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LECTURES 




CHICAGO 
1907 

ANNIE BESANT 

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THEOSOPHICAL 
LECTURES 

AND 

ANSWERS TO THEOSOPHICAL 
QUESTIONS 

BEING A PART OF THE TRANSACTIONS 
OF THE CONVENTION OF THE AMERI- 
: : CAN SECTION T. S. CHICAGO, 1907 : : 



CHICAGO 
THE RAJPUT PRESS 

(not incorporated) 

1907 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two C«py Received 

NOV 13 igor 

,Copyrimt Entry 

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1 COPY B( 



COPYRIGHT 1907 

BY 

ANNIE BESANT 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 
CHICAGO, 1907 



CONTENTS 



FAGE 

LECTURE I. 

Psychism and Spirituality 7 

LECTURE II. 
The Place of Masters in Religions 30 

LECTURE III. 
The Value of Theosophy in the World of Thought. . . 51 

LECTURE IV. 
Theosophical Work in India 79 

PART II. 

Answers to Theosophical Questions 97 



LECTURE I 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 

I have chosen, as the title of the lecture tonight, "Psych- 
ism and Spirituality," words which are constantly mis- 
used and confounded, one being used where the other 
should be employed. And I want, if I can tonight, in 
speaking to you of psychism and spirituality, to clearly 
define each, to clearly mark the difference between them, 
and to place it before you in a way that you will all be 
able to understand what should be meant when it is said 
a man is a psychic ; what should be meant when it is said 
a man is a spiritual being. We may define each word in 
a sentence, and the difference between the conditions I 
shall endeavor to work out and make plain. 

What is spirituality? Spirituality is the realization 
of unity. What is psychism ? Psychism is the manifesta- 
tion in and through matter of one aspect of the spirit, the 
aspect of intelligence. Pause for a moment on the defini- 
tion. Spirituality is the realization of unity, the seeing 
of the oneness of all things ; the seeing one life, one con- 
sciousness, one existence, alike in the dust of the earth 
and in the highest archangel — in God himself. Some of 
you will remember that Plato said of this highest condi- 

7 



8 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



tion possible to man : 'The man who sees the One in the 
many, him do I regard as a God." Nothing higher is 
possible for humanity than this realization of the oneness 
of all ; it is the basis of all morality. It is the foundation 
of every nation, of every true state; the losing of the 
smaller in the larger, the losing of the larger in the one 
Self of all. 

But Psychism is the working in a material body of one 
particular power of the spirit, the power of knowledge, 
of that aspect which is sometimes called the Knower in 
man. It matters not whether the manifestation be through 
the physical brain, or through some subtler matter; 
whether the perceptive power work in the physical senses, 
the eye cr the ear, or whether in finer senses, the inner 
eye, the inner ear; there is no difference— that is, no dif- 
ference of nature. 

And Psychism wherever it is found is nothing but the 
manifestation in and through matter of intelligence. Now 
putting the two definitions in that brief way— and I have 
so put them that they may be easily borne in mind— we 
shall find, as we examine them more closely, what is im- 
plied under each definition, we shall gain a patent, clearly 
defined, precise view as to the content and the limitation 
of each of these two words, and the powers in man that 
they describe ; and we shall not fall into the blunder of 
reverencing as a spiritual teacher, one who is simply a 
psychic. For although it is true that to the spirit all things 
are open, that to the spiritual eye there are no barriers, 
that matter cannot blind the eye of the spirit, that the 
spiritual man is necessarily a highly developed psychic, 
it is not true that every psychic is a spiritual man. A man 
may develop some of the powers belonging to the subtle 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



9 



body, without that unfolding of the spirit by which alone 
he can tread the roads that lead to the mountain peaks of 
the spirit. 

Now this word psychism, on which first we shall dwell, 
is derived from a Greek w r ord, meaning mind, and com- 
prises all the workings of the mind, without any distinc- 
tion between its workings in gross or subtle matter. In 
the word psychology it bears its true meaning, for psy- 
chology is the science of mind in all its workings, those 
at present normal and those at present abnormal. It is a 
blunder to confine the word psychism to the abnormal 
manifestations of intelligence. When you say psychism, 
you generally mean the abnormal manifestations only, 
and you do not include the general manifestations in 
which the physical brain is concerned. The word 
psychism has had its meaning limited to a particular class 
of the manifestations of intelligence, those abnormal man- 
ifestations which come through what we call the astral 
or mental bodies, in contradistinction to those which come 
through the physical. But to look at Psychism as lim- 
ited in this way is to open the door to endless misconcep- 
tions. You find people who admire intellectual manifesta 
tions — that is the manifestations of intelligence through 
the brain, who stand back alarmed, as though it were 
something dangerous, when that same intelligence mani- 
fests itself in the subtler matter belonging to the subtler 
bodies, and there are the manifestations that you call 
clairvoyance, clairaudience, and so on. Surely they are 
psychic, but if you take a newspaper or book, and read it 
with your physical eyes there is a psychic manifestation 
as much as if you read it with your astral eyes ; the same 
intelligence reads with physical and astral eyes, and you 



10 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



have no right to divide off, as many people do, the 
psychism of the brain from the psychism of the subtler 
bodies, and to praise the manifestation of the one and 
condemn the manifestation of the other. 

Many of you who are in the habit of reading theosoph- 
ical and other literature, which deals especially with the 
manifestations of the human thought and human intelli- 
gence, sometimes probably notice, in one class of writers 
especially, that there is a sort of dread of any psychic 
phenomenon which does not come through the physical 
brain, and with such writers to say that a man is a 
psychic is almost as if you were to say that a man is a 
burglar. It is time to cease from absurd prejudices and 
arguments of that sort. All organs belong to the matter- 
side of nature, and a man may have keen physical sight or 
he may be clairvoyant, and surely it is important that man- 
ifestations of intelligence in subtler matter, abnormal as 
they are for the moment, should be rationally understood, 
since they are becoming more and more normal. We 
are touching on those manifestations of the mind in man 
which will lift our senses, our power of observation, into 
worlds at present invisible to normal human sight. It is 
therefore important to realize the nature of those pow- 
ers, and their place in evolution, so that we may neither 
fear them on the one side nor unduly exalt them on the 
other. 

In order that the subject may be plain before you, pause 
on the constitution of man. Roughly you might be di- 
vided into two, the outward form and the life, matter 
and spirit, body and consciousness — the words do not 
matter. On the one side a living immortal intelligence, a 
spirit. On the other side a body, or bodies, made of va- 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



11 



rious densities of matter, and serving as a means of 
manifestation, an instrument of action, for the spirit. 

I know it is the habit in many western nations to think 
of man as possessing a soul, and we see discussion some- 
times on the question: "Has man a soul?" You want to 
put your question the other way. Man is a soul, or better, 
a spirit. He has a body through which that spirit comes 
into contact with the worlds in which he lives ; essentially 
you are spirit, immortal, not mortal; you are conscious- 
ness, and not merely form ; you are life, and not merely 
the garments with which life is clothed ; and you will 
never realize what this means, you will never understand 
your nature, if you begin with matter instead of spirit, 
with form instead of life, with body instead of conscious- 
ness, and identify yourself with the lower instead of with 
the higher. Spirit is life. Consciousness is life. Body, 
matter, are secondary. They are shaped and moulded by 
spirit, they are not its producer. Spirit is the master, 
matter is but the servant. Instead of identifying yourself 
with the passing bodies which you wear, with the body 
you take on earth ,and that you will cast aside at death, 
instead of thus limiting yourself and denying yourself, 
the immortal self, you should think of yourself, speak of 
yourself always as the spirit, and should affirm : "I am 
spirit. The body is my possession. I am life. The form is 
the garment which for certain purposes I wear." That 
then is to be our understanding of human nature ; man is a 
spirit, clothed in matter. 

The next point that we want to realize is that the mat- 
ter in which we clothe ourselves is not in any sense homo- 
geneous. It exists in many strata, in many densities. 
You may say that you know this, that there are solids, 



12 



THEOSOPHICAI LECTUEES 



liquids, gases in our body. We have much more than 
that. Not only solids and liquids and gases which make 
the coarser part of our body, but those others of which 
science is beginning to speak, which science is beginning 
to investigate, though imperfectly for lack of instruments 
of sufficient delicacy; by more highly developed lenses 
only can these imponderable, intangible bodies be under- 
stood and measured, for there are ethers beyond ethers, 
in ever increasing fineness of material. You have not 
mastered the mysteries of your body where you realize 
that there enter into it solid, liquid, gas, ether. Beyond 
the ether, as the ether is beyond the gas, subtler matter 
also enters into your material envelope. The next body 
of finer matter we call astral. The name is not important. 
That matter finer than the ether is the matter whereby you 
feel, exactly on the same principle whereby you see by 
certain vibrations in ether; so also other vibrations in 
ether represent what we call electricity, which some of 
you employ for the carrying of messages, for the moving 
of heavy bodies, etc. The light waves in the ether and the 
electric waves in the ether are different forms of waves, 
moving with different rapidities ; so also there are other 
rapidities of vibrations that are forms of matter as ex- 
actly correlated to what you call feeling and desire as the 
light waves are correlated to the eye, as the electric 
waves are correlated to other possibilities in matter. There 
is no jump as it is often said, in nature. Everywhere we 
find similarities, even identities, and on each plane similar 
sequences are repeated. 

Next comes the mental world, the world of thought, 
and there similar correspondences exist, only now we 
have vibrations that are correlated with its changes in 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRIT L'ALITY 



13 



consciousness that we call thoughts. The system is the 
same. The plan, the method are identical. Pure con- 
sciousness, which sees by certain vibrations of ether, feels 
by other vibrations, thinks by other vibrations. Not that 
t would be true to say that consciousness vibrates. Vibra- 
tions are of matter ; there are changes in consciousness ; 
and the two things, vibration in matter, change in con- 
sciousness, vary together, and are correlated with each 
other. Wherever there is change in consciousness there 
is vibration in matter, and wherever there is vibration in 
matter there is change in consciousness. The two work 
side by side. The two aspects of the one existence are 
correlated in a perfect correspondence, unbroken from the 
beginning of the universe to its end. It is the thought of 
God that has linked the two together ; it is the measuring 
of the supreme measurer that enables matter to answer to 
thought, and thought to control matter. There are endless 
subtleties, endless delicacies of vibration, and with the 
whole of these intelligence is constantly at work. Nay, 
more than that. It is the intelligence of the Self that 
builds matter according to its needs. 

I have not time this evening to trace the long course 
of evolution in which the functions of life, the expressions 
of the Spirit, have gradually shaped the physical body 
that you wear. I pause for a moment on one point, in 
order that you may realize what I mean when I say that 
the power of thought exercised on matter has shaped for 
its own manifestation the body of man. Any one who has 
studied anatomy at all knows that the brain of the unculti- 
vated man, who does not think beyond the brief necessi- 
ties of the day, is in its organization, simple, uncomplex : 
compared with the organization of the brain of some great 



14 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



thinker, some student, some philosopher, some one whose 
work in life is thought, and thought-expression. Again, 
you know that you ought not to teach your children along 
certain lines where the association of ideas is necessary 
for reasoning, until after seven years of age, when certain 
cells in the brain will have developed, will have thrust out 
their dendra, or rootlets, and made an anastamosing net- 
work between themselves ; slowly and gradually the pres- 
sure of the childish thinking causes this growth and de- 
velopment, the sending out of process after process, which 
interlink the one with the other, until the physical basis 
for thought is formed. There is a danger if, before that 
work is done by the thinker, complex thought through the 
brain is demanded, a danger lest you should overstrain the 
growing brain, lest you should injure its texture. For if 
that be done, the brain will not be ready for the more 
strenuous thought of your mature life, for the thought 
which is the power, which, working on the cells of the 
brain, makes them more and more complex as more and 
more they are exercised by the function of thinking, and 
you thus gradually develop and improve the organ of 
thought. And there is not one of us, old or young, who 
cannot still build his brain to higher purposes and shape 
his brain to greater power, by the exercise of that thought 
force which he already possesses. As he uses it, the brain 
grows. As he exercises it, the brain becomes more per- 
fect as an apparatus for thinking, and constantly day by 
day and night by night we are making the brains that we 
use in all the work, in all the operations of our daily life. 
Thus, then, does the Thinker work on the physical body, 
building the brain for physical use. 

But something more than that is going on in regard 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



15 



to your material envelope; as you think, as you exercise 
your power of thought, that thought is shaping, forming, 
organizing, developing, a body subtler than the physical. 
That matter which encompasses you, invisible to most 
but not to all, that we speak of as the astral body, the 
mind is working on that, preparing that for higher pur- 
poses, getting it ready for your use in the future, when 
in some other life you come back with the harvest you 
have sown. 

And in every one of you, as you think, as you desire, 
this next body, which is the organ of desire, of emotion, 
is gradually being organized. If your desire is noble, it 
will shape to noble purposes the body of desire. If you 
desire basely, the desires which rightly belong to the 
lower animal life will shape the body to its own ends. 
Now it is in connection with that body, that what are 
called "psychic faculties'' appear. I protested against the 
name as inaccurate, since intelligence working in the brain 
shows psychic faculties as much as it does in the astral 
body, but let me now use the word in the sense in which 
it is generally understood, when by psychic faculty is 
meant a faculty which enables persons to sense, possibly 
to see and hear, where others cannot sense, nor see, nor 
hear. 

Now this Psychism is of two kinds. Animals, especially 
dogs, horses and cats, have psychic faculties to a very 
considerable extent. Many dogs, for instance, see 
"ghosts." Many a horse sees, where his rider cannot see. 
Savages show a faculty sometimes which the civilized 
man does not possess, the power of communicating across 
great distances, the power of sensing a danger long before 
you or I would sense it. Sometimes dwellers in mountain 



16 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



regions develop psychic faculty in a peculiar form that we 
call "second-sight," which enables them to see before- 
hand where death will strike some one whom they love. 
Among the Highlanders of Scotland, among some of the 
Swiss, although there not so common, you find unculti- 
vated peasants showing forth this peculiar form of 
Psychism, and if you glance over your own people you 
will find a certain number of men and women who hre 
not highly developed intellectually, but who show these 
psychic qualities, receive warnings, premonitions, which 
come out right; who occasionally are able to see things 
that you cannot see; who foretell things that the intel- 
lect is not able to forecast ; and many of you may have 
wondered sometimes why those powers, that you your- 
selves do not possess, exist in people who are lower than 
you are in intellectual power and capacity. It is this 
that we call the lower psychism, and it belongs to the 
astral body as a whole, and sometimes to the centers in 
the astral body that are related to the physical senses, 
but may be affected by vibrations belonging to the astral 
plane. It often lacks precision and clearness, and espe- 
cially the power of control by the will. When contacted, 
the person sees. He does not seek to see. He cannot see 
at will, nor control the senses by the will. Things come 
and go. How and why? Because in the next world 
beyond this, in a world of matter higher than the physical, 
beings are living, events are occurring, continual happen- 
ings in finer matter as well as in the coarser matter that 
our senses recognize. 

Now just as on your physical body waves impinge and 
affect your body, so similar waves pass through the finer 
atmosphere of the astral plane, and impinge on the astral 



PSYCHISM AXD SPIRITUALITY 



17 



body. The impression may be pleasurable or painful, 
definite or indefinite ; it is often sensing rather than a 
clear vision. And as the intellect of man develops, as 
the mental power increases, that untrained lower form of 
psychic faculty disappears. The intellect strengthens. 
That general sensitiveness of the astral body to astral 
impacts diminishes, as the life of the man plays through 
the intelligence rather than through the life of sensation 
belonging to the grosser part of the astral body. That 
intermediate stage is the one in which are most people to- 
day among civilized nations. They have lost the psychic 
faculties of the little developed and savage races. They 
have the higher powers of intelligence, of which brain 
is the instrument. But is that second stage the final stage 
for man ? No. He may pass on from the working of the 
intelligence in the brain, pass on from the improvement 
of the brain for higher uses, evolve a subtler organism as 
perfect as, nay, more perfect than, the physical organism 
that we use. In the astral body, for the most part un- 
organized, he may gradually build up senses, may grad- 
ually shape to himself astral organs as the physical or- 
gans have been shaped, make perfect the astral body as the 
physical body has been perfected, and the whole work is 
done by thinking and effort, just as the physical organs 
have been formed in the same way. 

But the thinking that develops the subtler senses is 
more definite, more conscious, and more strenuous, and 
more persistent, than that which has shaped the grosser 
matter of our physical frames. When you read some- 
times in books of certain processes that have been 
followed from time immemorial, you are then convinced 
that those who are called yogis are simply men who real- 



18 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



ize these facts in human nature, and who have deliberately 
set themselves to shape and form, for their own higher 
purposes, the next body of finer matter which you possess 
as much as they. By education, by continued practice, 
which strengthens the will, these men, treading the path 
traced out for them through thousands of years in the 
past, learn to develop more rapidly than in the normal 
human evolution, the subtler body which is the common 
possession of every man, and every woman, and every 
child. They train it to respond to subtler vibrations. They 
train it to answer to sw r ifter waves, and slowly, stage by 
stage, by a carefully developed scientific system, they cre- 
ate, as it were, for themselves subtler organs which they 
can use as an instrument for study and work on the astral 
and mental planes. 

Side by side with that subtler body comes the evolution 
of a finer physical body as well; so that they learn to 
transmit from mental and astral to physical the experi- 
ences which in the mental and astral w r orlds they meet, 
and gradually they learn to separate themselves at will 
from the physical body, and to live in the worlds beyond 
the physical, until, gaining knowledge and studying phe- 
nomena, they bring back to the physical brain the knowl- 
edge they thus have won. 

Such men have what we call psychic faculties, by which 
they can see into the far-off past and can see into the near 
future, can read the thoughts of those with whom they 
come into contact, can judge their character, measure their 
dispositions, tell them of many a weakness of which the 
possessors may themselves be unconscious. 

But such development by the training need by no means 
be peculiar to an oriental race. Men and women in west- 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



19 



ern lands may do for themselves what the Hindus and 
the Buddhists do for themselves, but only along the same 
lines, and by the same methods, and in the same ways. 

Every great religion looks back to a founder to whom 
the world invisible were matters of knowledge and not of 
faith. Around the founders of every great religion were 
gathered groups of disciples and followers who developed 
the same powers, so that they might speak with the same 
knowledge, and these psychic faculties are those by which 
most of the higher experiences of humanity have been 
gained, by which the revelations of religion have been 
made, by which worlds beyond the gaze of the natural eye 
have been seen, observed, understood and explained. All 
prophets and mystics are what we call great psychics, and 
the evolution of the race at present is mounting on to that 
round of the ladder w r here the psychic faculties will be- 
come more and more common, where more and more 
children will be born with these faculties, more strongly 
and finely developed. On this great continent of yours, 
where one of the great steps forward of humanity will be 
made, and a new type brought to its fulfillment, on this 
continent you will have a race of psychics, children born 
with these faculties which still seem so strange, and more 
and more of them with each generation. Even now, on 
your western coast especially, a large minority of the pop- 
ulation have some development of these faculties, some 
powers which in the older countries of Europe are far less 
common. Evolution goes on more rapidly century by cen- 
tury, for the more the power grows, the more rapidly 
does that power increase in its development, so that 
it is right that you should try to understand what these 
faculties are. You should gradually come to look at their 



20 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



development as a natural stage in human evolution. You 
should come to regard it not with wonder and fear, but 
with calm common sense. It is a perfectly natural devel- 
opment, the next step forward, and the fact that a per- 
son can see further than you can see, that his eyesight is 
keener than yours is, is of no more significance, intel- 
lectually and morally, than are different keennesses of 
physical sight beween one person and another. 

Thus regarded, psychism takes its right place in human 
nature, in human growth. It is the higher development 
of faculties we already possess. It is the duplication of 
organs we already have, that are built in finer manner, 
and therefore respond to subtler influences. When you 
understand that it is only a question of degree ; when you 
realize that it is only a keener material sight, keener ma- 
terial senses, then will psychism and psychical develop- 
ment take their right place in human evolution, and in the 
minds and judgments of all sane men and women. People 
will cease to regard them with the respect which is never 
due to senses, whether coarse or subtle, whether gross or 
fine. 

Physical light can be developed to an extent which here 
would seem almost incredible. There are people who, if 
you place before them a heap of cotton, wool or silk, 
where you would see two or three shades of color, they 
will see many. Similarly with sounds, the hearing of 
some of the Indians is so acute that between two notes, as 
you would call them on the piano and organ, separated by 
a single tone according to the western nomenclature, they 
notice several different tones, while we hear only one. So 
great are the possibilities of still greater fineness even in 
the physical senses. 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



21 



And beyond those there are almost unlimited possibili- 
ties of fineness in the senses of the subtler bodies, in the 
organs which those bodies may evolve. There is not one 
of you who would not do something in the way of devel- 
oping the greater sensitiveness which would make your 
universe larger and wider than it is at present. Take one 
of the commonest forms of psychic faculties, the power of 
responding to a thought which is framed by some one 
else, with out written words, without apparatus or mech- 
anism of any kind; and yet it is not true to say that only 
the mechanism is in you instead of outside you. There is 
nothing more wonderful in developing in the brain — an 
organ so wonderful and complex — there is nothing more 
wonderful in developing in a part of it sensitiveness to 
the waves of thought, than there is in making the mar- 
velous apparatus which you already have for making 
waves in ether and sending them out without even a wire 
by which the current may be guided. It does not- seem 
strange to you now that a steamer in mid-ocean should 
communicate with the continent, sending out waves which 
throw the ether into motion and convey the message from 
that ocean steamer. Why then should it seem so mar- 
velous that you, with the power of thought that you pos- 
sess, should start currents in the thought ether in and 
around you, which can be guided by the will to strike 
on the receiving apparatus in another brain, and speak 
the message which in your brain has been generated? 
Why, one hundred years ago to speak across from Chi- 
cago to New York by making the telephone disc vibrate, 
how impossible it would have sounded, and yet now you 
talk from street to street, from city to city. Will it be 
very long in these days of rapid growth before the tele- 



22 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



phone disc will be, not in your room but in your brain, 
and the subtler mechanism of the brain will send out and 
receive the thought-messages from friend to friend, from 
parent to child. Already many can do it. Already some, 
by experiment, know such thought transference to be 
true. Sir William Crookes has so declared on his own 
experiments. Sir Oliver Lodge has given the same testi- 
mony. They have both proven by their own experiences 
that thought can be sent from brain to brain without the 
ordinary physical means of communication. But what 
does that development of psychism mean? It means that 
death will cease to be a barrier ; it means that thought will 
be able to bridge the gulf between what we call this world 
and the next; that the thinker, who is not dependent on 
the physical brain, will be able to send his message across 
the gulf that we call death, and communicate from thinker 
to thinker by the subtle waves of thought. You have 
already bridged the ocean; you will bridge the gulf of 
death, not by calling back, by the use of material means, 
those who have cast off the burden of the body and 
live in subtler worlds, in subtler forms, but by using that 
subtlest of all powers, the power of thought, which can 
cross from the living to those we call the dead, but 
who live far more vitally and vividly than we know, and 
communicate from one to the other the thoughts of love, 
of encouragement, of instruction; in the days of higher 
psychic evolution, death will be recognized only as an un- 
important event, it will only be going into another room, 
another world, with which the means of communication 
are complete. In this way psychism will bring you happi- 
ness, lift old sorrows from the human race, and quicken 
that long evolution that lies before us. In that increasing 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



23 



power of thought and deliberate control thereof lies the 
future of the higher evolution of man. It is the im- 
provement of the body, the improvement of the material 
organism in which the spirit is living. By such improve- 
ment, such higher organization, such evolution, such un- 
folding intelligence, man will grow mightier, more power- 
ful, more the master of matter, and in that future evolu- 
tion will come the linking of worlds visible and invisible. 

But all that has nothing to do with spirituality. That 
is the note I want you to remember: psychism is the im- 
provement of mechanism, of apparatus, not of spiritual 
power. 

Let us turn to the spiritual and see what it means. 
I defined it as the realization of unity. What lies under 
the phrase? With the growth of scientific thought the 
unity of man has been more and more recognized in- 
tellectually. Not one educated man or woman amongst 
you but would be prepared to admit a certain unity in 
mankind. But when you come to ask of w T hat nature is 
that recognition, most of you will be compelled to admit 
it is a recognition by the intellect alone. 

Now that is not spirituality. I do not say a recognition 
of the unity, but a realization of the unity. That is a 
very, very different thing. To realize the unity is for 
each of you to live in all forms, and not only in your 
own, to feel yourselves as suffering with the starvation 
of the starving, with the degradation of the degraded, 
to feel the sin of the sinner to be your sin, the misery 
of the miserable to be your misery. How easy to say, 
but how hard to realize. And how few of you would 
even wish to realize it, if you knew what it means to 
lead the spiritual life. Psychism comes by knowledge. 



24 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



Spirituality comes by love. To know the One, to feel 
the One, to realize the One, that is spirituality. But it 
means that you see no difference between yourself and 
others. It means that you identify yourself with every 
living thing. That is spirituality, — that and nothing less. 
Such has been the teaching of every great spiritual man 
who has lived in this lower world. There is no separa- 
tion for the man who lives in the spirit. Is that really, 
honestly, so desirable a thing? Are you willing to give 
up everything that you have, that you prize, and to share 
all with the lowest? Are you willing not to be yourself 
apart, not making a separation, not saying: "You are 
there and I am here, and I am holier, greater than you 
are"? If you are ready for that, you are ready for 
spirituality. To most it would be a danger. We speak 
of righteous indignation. But there is no such thing as 
indignation that can move the spirit who sees himself 
only, and cannot be indignant because all is himself. 
Righteous indignation is a valuable thing. Why? Be- 
cause men are not strong enough to come in contact with 
evil, and not have some desire to follow it, and thus they 
become polluted by the contact. Only the perfectly 
healthy can tread safely the contagious wards of a hos- 
pital, can walk among the diseased, and by their perfect 
health minister to the sick without catching the con- 
tagion. And for most people the indignation, even the 
repulsion, that they manifest towards evil is a safeguard 
and protection. It is necessary for the weak. You are 
not yet strong enough to be spiritual without peril to 
your own goodness. Do you remember the much quoted 
story of Olive Schreiner, the poetess and seer of South 
Africa? Once a woman passed through the gates of 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



25 



Heaven and trod the golden streets to approach the 
Throne. As she passed along those streets the angels 
looked at her, and they said to each other: ''How blood- 
stained are her garments, and how soiled her sandals !" 
And when she came before the Throne, the Christ looked 
at her and said: "Daughter, your garment is blood- 
stained and your sandals also; how comes it?" And she 
answered : "Lord, I walked through miry places, and a 
woman was lying in the mire, and I would not soil my 
sandals, and I trod upon her that my own feet might be 
clean, and a little of her blood stained my garment." 
And lo ! the City vanished, and again she trod the ways 
of earth. And again she came to the Heavenly City, 
but this time she came not alone. A woman was with 
her,— miserable, degraded. She held her close, and sup- 
ported her faltering steps. The mire and filth of the 
other woman stained her garments, and both were soiled, 
impure. As she passed along the golden streets, the an- 
gels whispered: "See how their garments shine! See 
how snow-white the raiment that they wear !" And when 
she came before the Throne, the Christ spake again and 
said: "Daughter, your garments are still stained/ 5 And 
she answered: "Lord, this is my sister. I saw her tram- 
pled in the mire and stooped down to lift her up. and in 
lifting her up my own garments became soiled, but I 
have brought her here." The Christ smiled, and all 
dwelt within the Golden City. 

The first was the righteous indignation against the 
fault; the second the spiritual state which is only val- 
uable as it purifies the soils of those around, that only 
makes the spiritual life. It means that if you are wise, 
your wisdom is not yours ; it belongs to all that need it 



26 



THEOSOPHXCAL LECTURES 



so that all may have knowledge. It means that if you 
are pure, your purity is not yours for separation; it is 
yours for sharing, that all may become pure. It means 
that you do not separate yourself from the lowest, but 
feel yourself as one with them ; that is spirituality. That 
is seeing the One, piercing through the form to the life, 
through the separateness to the unity. And how many, 
I say again, are willing to be one with all? You wish 
to be one of the saints, you wish to be one with the 
noble and the splendid. You claim the glory of sharing 
the humanity, which has been glorified by the Christs 
and the Buddhas of the world. You do well. It is yours. 
But you cannot share it, save as you share also the 
humanity of the lowest and the vilest. You cannot be 
one with the highest and separated at the same time from 
the lowest. It is either all or none. 

And there comes the crux, for many a good man and 
good woman wish to rise, but wish also not to touch 
the sinner. They cannot rise, without taking their brother 
with them. They desire to climb ; they cannot climb, 
save as their brethren climb with them. There is no soli- 
tary salvation; there is no individual salvation. A man 
is saved as all are saved, and salvation for some only 
would not be worth accepting. But only, as I said, the 
strong can do it. The weak must be lifted by their 
strength. 

There was a time when a Pharisee, a good man, a 
good citizen, asked a spiritual man to come and sit at 
meat with him. He came, and as he sat there a woman 
came from outside and caressed his feet, and the master 
of the house said: ''This man cannot be a prophet, or 
he would know what manner of woman this is that 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



27 



touches him." Only a Christ is pure enough to be 
touched by a Magdalene. The ordinary man would be 
polluted, for her touch would raise a thought of sin. 

But there is no reason why we should not raise our 
eyes to a magnificent ideal, even if the weakness of the 
average soul prevents us from realizing it in ourselves, 
and spirituality is the thing to which we must all ulti- 
mately come. It is the triumph of humanity, it is the 
height of human perfection, to know no difference, to 
realize that whatever you have and are, you have and are 
for all, and not for yourself alone. And nothing less 
than that is spirituality ; then the wisdom which you have, 
gives the power to inspire men to rise, and helps to ele- 
vate them from the separateness which is death. How 
wide, then, the difference between psychism and spiritu- 
ality ! How vast the difference ! Both are good. Both 
have their use. Both ultimately must join in the perfect 
man. The perfect one who knows himself as one with 
all, will have matter for his servant and all faculties at 
his command. And you may follow which road you will, 
choose which path you prefer ; only understand and 
realize w T hat you are aiming at, and then your steps 
will be surer. 

And this I would say in closing the description of what 
psychism means, what spirituality means. Spirituality 
grows in the life of the home, in the common life of man, 
in the daily contact of elders and youngers, superiors 
and inferiors, wise and foolish, pure and impure — ,there 
lies the field in which spirituality is to be won. You 
need not go far away from others, you need not seek 
seclusion in jungle or desert, you need not seek to leave 
the life of the city, nor to separate yourself from any 



28 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



of the walks or avocations of mankind. In the midst of 
all those, in the midst of constant separation, the sense 
of unity is best developed, the powers of the spirit are 
unfolded, for this world has so been shaped that it is a 
school, and you may there practice the life which is un- 
folding of the spirit in man. Every time you are pure, 
you help to purify the impure. Every time you try to 
be noble, you tend to uplift the base. You are taking a 
step forward to the realization of spirituality. Here and 
nowhere else is that lesson to be learned. 

Among all the differences which separate, among all 
the perplexities of common life, these lessons of love, of 
sympathy, of identifying one's self with the thoughts 
and feelings of others, are the road that leads to the 
highest spirituality; the powers of the spirit will unfold 
in the home, in the common relations of men and women, 
in fatherhood and motherhood, with husband and wife, 
with friend and friend, with elder and younger. There 
are the lessons by w r hich spirituality will be learned. 
Every touch of sympathy, every feeling with another, 
every effort to understand, is one letter in the alphabet 
which will enable you to read correctly the word spirit. 
As in one life you practice it, and in the interval between 
death and rebirth work all your practice into power, 
you will climb up that great ladder whose foot is in the 
mud of separation, but whose top is in the heavens of 
the spiritual height where there is no division, no separa- 
tion, no mind, no body, but only One, and that One the 
Self of all. Altruism is noble. It is a step in the right 
direction ; but greater than altruism is identity. It is not 
"you" and "myself" for us, and one working for another. 
We are one. That is the last word of the spiritual teach- 



PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY 



29 



ing of all the ages, and to see but for one moment the 
sp!endor of that vision is to take the first step toward 
the realization of it in one's self, is to begin to tread the 
path which Plato describes, as I said in the beginning, 
to make the man a God. 



LECTURE II 



THE PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 

Friends : I will ask you tonight to travel backward with 
me, ascending the stream of time to a period which 
history scarcely recognizes at all. Far, far back into 
antiquity, where there is a mist around the stories of the 
peoples, where figures are scarcely distinguishable, 
where names are well-nigh unknown. And as we thus 
travel backward and begin to look at the many rills 
and sources which have gradually fed the great stream 
of human life, until in later days it swelled into a mighty 
river, we shall see beside each source a mighty figure 
seated, a figure that blends into itself the two supreme 
offices of human life, of human development, — the ruler 
who shapes the policy of his nation, and the teacher who 
gives it its religion, under whose influence the nation 
grows and evolves. King-priest was the ancient title, 
and so blended were the two offices that you could 
scarcely distinguish where the one ended and the other 
began. 

And in the furtherest off times of old there are three 

30 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



31 



great civilizations. Two of them have left their ruins 
still for the study of the antiquarian and the archaeologist. 
The third disappeared long ages since under the waves 
of that mighty volume of water which now we call the 
Atlantic Ocean. 

In that far off time, in the Toltec empire of ancient 
Atlantis, there was the splendid capital known as the 
City of the Golden Gates. And there a great king-priest 
ruled, who shaped and taught his people. And the only 
remnant that remains of that most ancient civilization 
is among the Chinese people in one of their most ancient 
books, in that most exquisite of all the gems of Chinese 
literature, called, when translated, the Classic of Purity. 
It is very short, marvelously profound, full of spiritual 
beauty and spiritual wisdom. And the man who wrote 
down the words of that Classic of Purity declared, in 
very ancient times, that he in his turn, had taken it 
from a very ancient source, from the ruler of the Golden 
Gate. And only in that place, so far as I know, does 
history (as here history is now recognized) mention that 
ancient city, that center of the great Atlantean civiliza- 
tion. 

But two mighty offshoots came from that, ancient 
Chaldea and ancient Egypt, and those have left many a 
ruin and many a fragment and many a record, to tell 
us something of how the people lived, how they thought, 
and how they worshiped. 

And if w r e look at Chaldea, one of the fourth-race 
nations, we find there a gigantic figure, grandiose and 
mighty, who brought, it was fabled, civilization to his 
people out of the sea; for he came from that great At- 
lantean empire, after the continent had been rent in 



32 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



twain by the convulsions which sank it beneath the 
waves. They called him Oannes, and he outlined for 
them their religion, gave them their polity, and in later 
ages was worshiped in their temples, and from his 
teaching and from his power the great Chaldean civiliza- 
tion grew strong and mighty. But it has no infancy, no 
childhood. It appears full grown. 

So with ancient Egypt, history knows no time during 
which the Egyptian civilization passed through the early 
stages of infancy and youth. As one of the greatest 
of Egyptologists declares, Egypt springs upon the stage 
of history, full-grown, complete. That is cne of the 
strange peculiarities of those ancient civilizations. They 
were greatest at their earliest time, and their story has 
been a story of decline, not of ascent. But how great 
was the civilization of Egypt in those early days we can 
judge from the remnants of her architecture, unrivaled 
among the architecture of the world. What hands poised 
those mighty stones, reared those gigantic pillars? By 
what mechanical force, by what kind of apparatus, did 
the engineers of ancient Egypt raise the stones that make 
the top of the arches in the Temple of Karnac? By 
what power were those mighty monuments erected ? Did 
fingers of mortal man place those stones where still 
they stand? 

And not only in architecture was Egypt great ; she 
was great in manufactures, great in commerce. The ex- 
quisite beauty of her weaving is not rivaled by any mod- 
ern loom. The grace and the delicacy of some of her 
metallic work cannot be reproduced in our boasted civili- 
zation. There chemistry was born. There astronomy 
and astrology were practiced. There the Zodiac was 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



33 



limned, its figures, strange, mystic, difficult to decipher. 

Three of the great fourth-race civilizations are then 
presided over by these mighty figures, the Divine kings ; 
history in Egypt calls them the Divine dynasty; they 
were fathers of their people in every sense of the word, 
teachers of all the arts, of all the skill of fingers that 
makes a material civilization great, and mighty also in 
that triumphant thought which is the crown of a great 
civilization. For still may you read their thought in the 
scattered pages that are called the Book of the Dead — 
because fragments were placed on the breasts of mummi- 
fied corpses, and then the cloths were wound round and 
round over them — pages inscribed with the Words of 
Power and the Signs of Power, by which the soul that 
had inhabited the mummy form was to win his way 
through the portals of the nether world, and compel to 
his obedience the forces that guarded entrance after en- 
trance, gate after gate. Who were those divine kings, 
teachers, prophets, lords of knowledge and of power? 

But leave those most ancient of all the civilizations, 
dead as they are with only the remnants left behind, and 
come to the oldest civilization of the great Aryan family 
that still survives in the peninsula we call India. There 
again a great figure stands out, the Manu, king and priest. 
So strongly, so wisely and well did the Manu lay the 
foundations of his nation and outline the teachings of the 
religion that he gave to his people, that even now tens, 
nay, hundreds of thousands of years afterwards, the mod- 
ern British conqueror still administers for Manu's people 
portions of the code of laws that he gave them in those 
ancient days. 

Still a little further follow our stream downward till we 



34 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



reach Persia. There also a mighty figure is to be seen. 
You may see him standing beside the altar that he has 
builded, with the rod of power in his strong right hand. 
And as he raises up to Heaven that rod and speaks the 
words of power, down from the heavens flashes the light- 
ning in answer to his bidding, and fires the altar on which 
the fuel has been laid prepared for its coming. It is 
Zarathusitra, the great Persian prophet, the founder of 
the Zoroastrian religion, only represented today by some 
eighty thousand men, called Zoroastrians, or Parsees, in 
India. 

Still further descend and another great figure greets us, 
Gautama, the Buddha, the founder of one of the mightiest 
creeds that still exist. Within historic time we now find 
ourselves, and his figure is more clearly outlined, more 
definitely traced. You need not turn to any occult records 
to read the wondrous story of that Indian prince, the 
founder of a mighty faith. 

Still further come down, and the Christian creed is 
born. For three years a mighty teacher passes up and 
down through Palestine teaching his doctrines, among 
the remnants of that people who once knew Moses as their 
law-giver, their guide. And he gives to those people 
whose religion was on the decline a new religion which 
was to mould the new civilization of the West. 

But here for the first time among the great founders of 
religion the two officers of ruler and priest have become 
disjoined. The conditions of the time, the needs of the 
nation, the political and social state of the people, no 
longer permitted that the teacher of a religion should also 
be the ruler of the realm, and only in mockery did his 
enemies call him king, although more royal in his wisdom 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



35 



and his life than many — nay, than all — earthly monarchs. 

And still a little further we come to the youngest of 
all the great faiths. We find Mohammed, the prophet of 
Arabia, the founder of the faith of Islam. And with him 
the mighty series closes of those who have founded great 
faiths, and who are looked up to by thousands, by mil- 
lions of men, as prophets and reyealers of the divine. 
Those men are what we mean by the Masters. 

Thus every faith has its own Master. Not one of all 
the great religions of the world, living or dead, but traces 
itself back to some such figure, Master, Teacher of its 
faith, So that no religion can deny this great fact of the 
divine-human Master. A religion may deny the Masters 
of other faiths, but it ever claims its own. And where 
such a claim is found in every direction, where every faith 
living or dead looks back to some great figure, human in 
its outline but divine in its splendor, it is only those who 
are narrow, nay who are ignorant, who can confine this 
splendid possibility of man made perfect to one particular 
faith, to one particular race. 

And the word "Master, " as applied to the great ones, 
to these superhuman teachers of humanity, is a word 
which should be especially acceptable in all Christian 
lands. It cannot strike the Christian ear as strange, as 
alien. It was the name that Jesus, called the Christ, took 
as his own name from his disciples. "Ye call me master 
and lord. And ye say well, for so I am." And again, 
"Neither be ye called master; for One is your master, 
even Christ." So when in modern days you hear that 
Theosophists speak of the Master or the Masters, the 
sound should come to you as familiar and beloved. It is 
the same name which your own great teacher took as his, 



36 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



for it represents a great idea. It is the name of an office 
rather than the name of a person. So the first thing that 
defines for us what is meant by the word Master in re- 
lation to religions is that he is the founder of some great 
faith. He is its authority. He is its prophet and its 
teacher, he the head to whom all of that faith look up, 
he is the responsible founder, as the promulgator, of the 
teachings which that faith includes. 

And our first clear definition of the Master is that he is 
the founder, the teacher of great spiritual truths, that he 
gives a new impulse to religious life, starts a fresh wave, 
as it were, of spiritual power, brings out of the inex- 
haustible sources of spiritual life, a new impulse to sweep 
over the world, to revive all faiths that are dying, and to 
give a new form to the ancient truth, to reproclaim the 
most ancient of all messages. That is the place, that is 
the function of a Master. 

And next, he is always what is called a liberated spirit. 
He is not bound ; he is no longer compelled by the great 
law to come back again to earth for new experiences in 
the school of life. He has learned all. The earth has 
nothing more to teach him. There is nothing more for 
him to learn. For him the value of all experiences in 
gross matter is exhausted. If he is still here, it is no 
longer for himself, no longer compelled to serve, but serv- 
ing in the liberty of voluntary gift, bearing fetters that 
he places on his own limbs, not bound by external law, but 
only by an inner compulsion of compassion, of the will to 
help. And all nations have recognized in the founder of 
their faith, this supreme freedom. He comes of his own 
will. He stays by his own volition. No man can either 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



37 



give him life, or take it from him. He is Master of life 
and death. 

And now and again in ancient scriptures this note of a 
Master comes out. "Never," said a great Chinese Mas- 
ter, "never will I enter into final peace alone. I will re- 
main, I will struggle, until the last has entered in." And 
so in many another scripture you may read the same 
idea. He is here, but he is not compelled. He is free, 
only voluntarily bound. He is spoken of in a verse that 
is probably familiar to all of you in the Revelation of St. 
John, the seer of Patmos, as "He who overcometh." And 
it is written of the conqueror, that "I will make him a 
pillar in the temple of my God, that he shall go forth no 
more." The goings forth for him are over. He is the pillar 
on which the universe is built. Free, only voluntarily 
bound, that is another mark of the Master, the liberated 
soul. In the older Christian days, before the great teach- 
ing of re-incarnation had dropped out of the Christian 
church, that was the meaning of the word "salvation." 
Not the salvation that you hear of now, the saving of men 
from some imagined everlasting torment, but that salva- 
tion which is the -manifestation triumphant of God in 
man, the inner divinity shining forth upon the world. It 
is the liberation of the Hindu ; he speaks of a man becom- 
ing "liberated" when he is beyond all the illusions of 
earth and matter, and knows himself as one with all. 
Such then is a Master, a liberated soul. 

But there is another point about the Master. He is al- 
ways in the body. It would not profit to try to describe 
to you the many possibilities that open up before a man 
made divine, the many paths of service, the many ave- 
nues in the universe to which he belongs, and which he 



38 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



may tread in the service of that universe. Many names 
are given in the different books to the different classes 
of the spirits that are free. The peculiarity of those 
whom we speak of as Masters, or whom religions may 
speak of as Masters, is that they always keep the human 
body up to a certain limit. Freedom of spirit may be 
gained and the soul pass away utterly from the earth. But 
the Master is one who, winning freedom, cares not for it 
until all his race shall gain the freedom that he has won, 
and who deliberately remains in a human body, willingly 
bears the burden of the flesh, restricts his divine powers 
within the limitations of the outer form of man, until his 
work is over, until his task is complete, And that makes 
the next strong feature in this limning of the picture of 
the Master. 

He always dwells in a human body. For how long? 
Until the religion that he has given to the world has 
spoken its last teaching, has left its last believer free. 
That is the limit. The law of Karma, which binds all em- 
bodied ones, claims from every Master that he shall bear 
the full responsibility of the teachings which he has given 
to the world. And that responsibility is a responsibility 
heavier than some of you may be inclined to think. Take 
for a moment the wondrous teachings of the Christ, per- 
fect in their spiritual power, splendid in their pure moral- 
ity, inspiring in the love that fills them, and in the self- 
sacrifice of which the Christ is one of the supreme exam- 
ples — in your view probably perfect teachings. Yet the 
teachings of the great Lodge of Masters to whom the 
Christ belongs were perfect, but they were spoken in an 
imperfect world, taught to imperfect men, placed in hands 
that were not strong enough to hold them, in hearts not 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



39 



wise enough to understand. That is the great penalty 
that every Master must face. He gives perfect teachings 
to an imperfect world. And out of the imperfections of 
the world, out of the mistakes of his followers, is made 
the burden that the Master bears upon his mighty shoul- 
ders while his religion endures. There can be nothing 
perfect in a world which is imperfect. The Master must 
bear that necessary penalty of imperfection. An ancient 
eastern scripture says, that just as a fire is enveloped 
in smoke, so is all action enveloped in imperfection. Even 
the teachings of a divine man are soiled by the imper- 
fections of those who accept them and pass them on to the 
world. 

Hence the Master is always a sacrifice in every religion. 
There is no religion, living or dead, ancient or modern, 
but that its central figure is marked with the mark of 
sacrifice. Out of that, twisted by ignorance, by folly and 
by human pettiness, many a false doctrine has grown 
and spread in many religious communities. But the very 
essence of the sacrificial act places on the Master the bur- 
den that his teachings in the world must bear fruit of evil 
as well as fruit of good, and that no teachings, though 
spoken by the mouth of a man grown into divinity, but 
must have evil fruits as well as good, because of the im- 
perfection of the hearers, the blunders of the believers. 
And the whole of that is the burden every Master who has 
founded a religion, who has given a new religion to the 
w r orld, must bear. 

See the history of the Christian church, see how much 
of evil is mingled with its good. See the persecutions 
and the hatreds, the wars and the exilings, which stud the 
whole history of Christendom, which soil the pages of that 



40 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



history with tears and with blood. And the whole of this 
must weigh on the great central figure, and he may not 
leave the earth, nor put off the burden of the flesh, until 
the whole of that mighty Karma is utterly fulfilled, until 
the work of the religion is finished, and its last believers 
have either passed into liberation or into some other faith. 
That is the sacrifice. 

Do you notice how carefully the Christian church in 
its various creeds and articles in the different communi- 
ties, has laid stress on the continuing humanity of the 
Christ, how strictly they have laid down in creed and in 
dogma that the human body is still existing, that with 
that body the ascension took place. And in that, however 
crudely it is sometimes put, however much it is sometimes 
misunderstood, there lies hidden the germ of this great 
truth that the Master is in the midst of his religion in 
the body so long as that religion lives upon earth. When 
the religion dies, then and then only may he lay down the 
burden of the body. 

Now that great truth means to men that he is always 
within reach, an idea that in modern days has slipped very 
much, in all the fulness of its reality, out of the hearts 
and minds of Christian men and women. They have 
thought too much of a Christ far away, instead of the liv- 
ing humanity which links every believer to the Master 
whom he serves. And so they have lost much of the very 
essence of the teaching, much of the strength and of the 
comfort that come out of the realization of the human 
life of the teacher who founded the religion. 

And especially is that true in Christian Protestant com- 
munities. They want the living voice of the living 
teacher, and a book has been placed, as it w r ere, as the 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



41 



center, or the foundation, if you will, of the religion. And 
in nothing more does the reality of that living presence 
show itself than in the way in which scholarship and 
criticism have been guided during the last half century, 
at least, to tear manuscript after manuscript into pieces, 
and to destroy that historical foundation of the eternal 
teachings which need no book, for the Spirit is ever liv- 
ing, which writes every book and every bible. If the re- 
ligions of the world vanish, still the divine spirit would 
not be without its testimony, and new bibles could replace 
the old ones that criticism destroys. But the value of the 
criticism lies in this, that it is forcing the Christian peo- 
ple back to the figure and the life of the Christ, instead 
of to the books that have record of that living. For the 
true foundation of religion is not in books. It is not in 
anything that is without, but in that which is within, 
human experience, the contact of the human conscious- 
ness with God. That is the rock upon which every re- 
ligion is founded, and books are unnecessary; however 
much they may give delight and consolation, they are 
not of the essence of the thing. And the Christian church 
is being driven back to human experience by the scourge 
of criticism, by the whip of scholarship ; and it will be the 
richer and not the poorer when it bases its belief on the 
testimony of the living spirit in every Christian, instead 
of on the traditions of churches and the authority of coun- 
cils in one land or another. And so we gradually come to 
the close of the work of a Master in his religion. It is 
to found it, to revise it, as it languishes, to force it into 
the living realization of the spirit when it is clinging too 
much to the letter that kills, to the conventions that 
cramp. 



42 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



Now, in the Theosophical Society, where this word 
Master is so continually heard, the idea is exactly the 
same as in all the great religions. The only difference 
is that to us it is more of a present, a living reality, than 
it is apt to be among the older faiths, which in the long 
passage of time have lest some of the vitality into which 
they were born. The Theosophical Society is simply the 
expression of a new spiritual impulse, the expression of 
a new wave of spiritual life. It can never be understood, 
either by those inside it, or by those outside it, if it is 
looked at as a thing new, unique, isolated, out of touch 
with all that has gone before, with all the great relig- 
ions of the past. It is nothing more than a reaffirmation 
of the ancient truths, putting the old thought into a new 
form, more suited to the modern mind, with nothing new 
really to give, but only the old things that have been for- 
gotten ; to bring them back to human knowledge and suit 
them to human demands ; it is exactly the same in its in- 
ception with every great religion that has ever been born 
into the world, by the will of the great Lodge, made up 
of all the Masters, and comes to give the world a new 
help, a new current of life, to revivify, to strengthen, to 
inspire. And you will only understand it, if you see it 
as one of the great series, one of the innumerable waves 
which have followed each other, one after another, all 
carrying the same truth, all bringing the same stimulus 
to mankind. 

And there is only one great difference between the 
Theosophical Society, from the religious standpoint, and 
all its mighty fore-runners, the religions of the past. 
And it is this : that every religion of the past called 
people to come into it as believers, built a wall, and 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



43 



within that wall believers, and outside the wall unbe- 
lievers. And so each great religion has made a certain 
barrier, necessary for the time. Part of the great evolu- 
tionary scheme, but still a barrier, a wall, which sepa- 
rated those who believed from those who rejected the 
particular teacher. 

And hence with every new religion sprang up new 
heresies, and with every fresh impulse of spiritual life 
a body was formed which enclosed it, out of which it 
cannot flow. But in this latest child of the great stock 
of wisdom, the latest branch of the wisdom tree, there 
is no such exclusiveness. It asks no man to leave his 
faith, nor to change his name. It does not say to the 
Christian, you must cease to be a Christian in becoming 
a theosophist. It does not say to the Buddhist, or to the 
Hindu, or to the Zoroastrian, give up your religion and 
come within this new fold which we have builded, within 
this new wall that we have made. It says to the Chris- 
tian and the Hindu and the Mussulman, and the Zoroas- 
trian, stay where you are; remain in the religion into 
which you were born; but instead of thinking that only 
your religion is right and all others wrong, recognize 
all religions as coming from the same source, and as 
seeking the same goal ; realize that there is only one 
religion, the search after God, and that all religions are 
ways of searching, methods of searching, roads that have 
the same end in view. Just as many roads may lead to a 
single town, and according to the place at which the 
traveler is standing will he be walking north or south, 
or east or west, but always towards the one city in 
which all the roads find their ending, so is man's search 
after God along whatever road that search carries him. 



44 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



That search is certain of its ending. It ends in knowl- 
edge, in the finding of the God he has sought. And 
hence Theosophy, calling itself only the divine wisdom 
and not by any more particular name or label which 
would make it exclusive, declares to people of all faiths : 
You have already theosophical teachings in your midst; 
they are teachings which you share with every other re- 
ligion, the fundamental verities of human and divine life. 
You can find them where you will, for they are to be 
found everywhere. You may study them in the Yedas 
of the Hindu, in the Pitakas of the Buddhist, in the 
scriptures, the testaments of the Christian, and in Al 
Quran of Islam. It matters not into what book you 
look; the same truths are found everywhere. What is 
wanted is not that you should change your faith, but 
learn to live it ; not that you should believe it alone, but 
learn to understand it. And that is the only great differ- 
ence between the Theosophical Society as an expression 
of a mighty religious impulse and those already gone 
before it, historically, in point of time. 

It has no exclusions. Theosophy is yours, whatever 
your faith may be, quite as much as it is mine. It is only 
mine because it is universal, and any man who claims 
it for his own by that very claim denies it, for he has 
no right to it, save as a member of the universal brother- 
hood of man, and that is a common possession. It ex- 
cludes, it exiles none. And so when in the church today 
we see a clergyman preaching theosophical truths under 
another name, we rejoice, we are glad. We care not for 
labels but only for that which the label describes. And 
it is the duty of the theosophist everywhere to clothe 
the old teaching in the garb which makes it most ac- 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 



45 



ceptable to the people to whom at the time, he is speak- 
ing. Clothe it in Christian words, in Hindu forms, in 
Buddhist phrases, — what matters it? The truth is every- 
where the same. And so it is a peace-maker, reconciling 
religions, leading them to understand each other, lead- 
ing them to realize the value of their common possession. 
And wherever it spreads it carries religious peace. And 
by the light it brings it shows the folly of religious con- 
troversy. 

But this Theosophical Movement is a far larger thing 
than our Theosophical Society. We are only the self- 
conscious part of the movement. We can see it sweeping 
over the whole world, under a dozen different names. 
Everywhere where spirituality rises above materialism, 
everywhere w r here the ideal triumphs over the grosser 
forms of matter, there is the spirit of the Ancient Wis- 
dom permeating the various strata of modern life. And 
when in the Society we speak of the Masters, we are 
only speaking of some of those who are familiar as the 
founders of the great religions of the world. It may 
seem a great claim to say that those mighty ones of the 
past, the founders of the world's faiths, walk through 
this latest impulse, this youngest child of religion. And 
yet it is so. Wherever Theosophy is found and the Mas- 
ters' names are again uplifted before the eyes of men, 
there the religion of the country begins to revive, and 
new life is seen thrilling through its veins. When first 
the Society went to India, Hinduism was languishing, 
threatening to decay. That great mother of the world's 
religions, with its wonderful philosophy, with its mar- 
velous spirituality, was being rejected by its own chil- 
dren, dazzled by the new light from the west. It was the 



46 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



same with Buddhism. It was the same with Zoroastrian- 
ism. All those great religions were dying when the 
founders of the Theosophical Society first set their feet 
on the Indian shore. And now through all those east- 
ern lands is thrilling a new life. Now, the Buddhist is 
proud of his faith and is training his children by thou- 
sands and by tens of thousands in his own schools, where 
his own faith is taught to his own sons and daughters, 
and his religion has become a pow r er, whereas before it 
threatened to die. And so it is through the length and 
breadth of India, the mighty Hindu religion has lifted up 
its head again, and is once more beginning to do its 
great work of civilizing and moralizing its own people. 
And each religion, in proportion as some of its members 
have entered the Theosophical Society, has grown 
stronger, more vitalized, more powerful, and the old 
mystical ideas have again been reasserted on the reality 
of the touch of this world with w r orlds invisible. 

See the change in Europe which is sweeping over the 
Christian churches. In England with its great church 
establishment, see how different Christianity is now from 
what it was some thirty years ago. See how liberal it is 
becoming, how the mystic side" is reasserting itself, how 
the old crude ideas are gradually disappearing, and how f 
a fresh spirit is breathing throughout the length of that 
Christian land. 

See in the Roman Catholic church, which seems so 
bound up by tradition and by convention, how a new 
spirit is beginning to appear, how in Spain and in Italy, 
the most dogmatic of all Roman Catholic countries, there 
is a movement towards liberalism, a movement towards 
a wider and truer view of Christian teaching, a gradual 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 4; 



moving among the dead bones of dogma and the begin 
ning of the appearance of the real spiritual life. 

These are the changes which everywhere we see. And 
the value of a Theosophist in a particular religious com- 
munity is simply that he is a channel; through him the 
power of the Master is shown ; through him the power 
of the Christian Master, still called by the name by which 
you call him, by the name of Jesus, is able to work upon 
his church as he has not been able to do for many a long 
year. For there is this law in religious life that each 
impulse, after some hundreds or thousands of years, 
needs reinforcement by fresh impulse, and one impulse 
after another comes from the same Lodge, and each 
great Master uses it for his own purposes and his own 
belief. 

But how do Masters become? They grow out of 
humanity. They are only the first fruits of the human 
race, not differing in nature, but only in their stage of 
evolution, from the men and women among w r hom they 
live. You remember the wish of the great Initiate, St. 
Paul, for those whom he won to the teaching of Christ. 
"My little children/' he said, "of whom I travail in birth 
again, until Christ be formed in you." There is no man 
nor woman who has not within the germ, the potentiality 
of the Christ. A religion is only successful as it trains 
some of its children to mount that high peak of spirit- 
uality on which the Christs of the world are standing, 
not that they may be only worshiped as outside helpers, 
but reproduced in the heart of man, until all become like 
themselves. And the mark of the Christ is that he is 
able to share his life with all who are willing to recieve. 

You have in the far off future before you that splendid 



48 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



destiny, that perfection of man made divine. None is 
excluded from it. It is our human birthright. None is 
beyond the possibility of it. No, it is a certainty in time 
to come. Your freedom only lies in quickening it or in 
delaying it. Your growth may be slow, as you will, 
but it is sure, and it is the blessed destiny of man to 
climb at last those peaks of which I speak, and join 
the company of the Redeemers of the world, of the men 
who are humanity's first fruits, the promise of what 
humanity shall be. 

And I ask you, is there possible for human brain, or 
human heart, an ideal more inspiring, a hope more full 
of life, a thought more pregnant with mightiest power, 
than the thought : "I may become a redeemer of the 
race"? It would be so poor, so miserable, so petty a 
thing, to win salvation only for oneself. What value 
that one human soul should be saved, if other human 
souls sink into a pit of misery inexpressible? What 
human heart, what human brain, would care for salva- 
tion unless salvation be universal? And the earlier wan- 
ning only means the earlier helping, means that we be- 
come a wing to lift humanity upward, instead of a clog 
to be lifted by the stronger than ourselves. 

And if the Theosophical Society is to be of value to 
the world, if it is to do the work which its Masters de- 
sire it should do, it is because it opens again the ancient 
narrow way, because it points again to the more rapid 
possibility of evolution in which man, taking his evolu- 
tion into his own hands, may co-operate with nature, 
may run where others are walking, and so, outstripping 
his fellows, may become a power to lift people up where 
otherwise they would stumble. 



PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS 49 

And because of this, because it opens up this possi- 
bility to the race, it is that we say to none, "come," if 
they are not willing, We do not plead with you to join 
the Society. If you say to us, "Why should we join?" 
we have no answer to give you. All that we have of 
books, of public teaching, we give you fully inside or out- 
side the society. There is nothing to gain by coming 
into it, except the consciousness that you are one of those 
who are building the future of the world, the knowledge 
that you are a conscious co-operator with nature, to make 
the progress of humanity at large swifter than it other- 
wise would be. There are some men and women born 
into their race, to whom that hope is the strongest at- 
traction, the most imperious of compulsions. There are 
human beings who do not care to walk along the road 
that has been made by the troubles and toils of others. 
They claim the work of the pioneer to cut through the 
jungle, to make the road for others, to move away the 
stones that would cut the feet of others, making the 
road on which the weaker souls and hearts may walk. 
That is our only attraction, the spirit of the pioneer. 
We attract those who want to do the work in order that 
others may be the better for their working, those who 
are willing to struggle, to suffer, to have their own feet 
cut by the sharp rocks, in order that the way may be 
made smooth so that other feet may walk uninjured, un- 
harmed. That is the only attraction to come into this 
little spiritual society that is striking to make the work- 
ers for the future. Only those who hear that voice in 
the silence, summoning all to help who are willing to 
help, only they will spring forward and say: "Here am 
I; send me where there is work to be done. Let my 



50 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



hands be the hands of a worker;" that our only prize, 
that our only reward. 

But of all the rewards which earth can offer, of all 
the crowns with w r hich humanity crowns her children, I 
know of none so attractive, I know of none that raises 
such passionate enthusiasm, as the permission to work 
that others may enjoy, the permission to labor that others 
may have rest; that splendid work, which proclaims the 
future while the difficulties of the present are upon us 
and in the darkest midnight proclaims the dawn, and has 
faith in the sun rising to dissipate the darkness of the 
night. 



LECTURE III 



THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY IN TEE WORLD OF 
THOUGHT 

Friends : Our subject for tonight is 'The Value of 
Theosophy in the World of Thought.' , And by that 
phrase, "the world of thought," I mean especially to 
mark out the great intellectual fields in which human 
mental activities are continually being carried on, the 
world of thought in the department of religious life; 
then in the department of the life of art; then in the 
life of science; then in the life of politics. 

And when you take these different departments, in one 
or more of w r hich all thoughtful people are interested, 
the question may naturally be put to the exponents of a 
philosophy, the philosophy of life : "What have you to 
say with regard to each of these great departments of 
human interest ?" What difference would it make to a 
man, to a woman, if they accept theosophy as a guide 
in their intellectual and their public life? How will it 
affect them? What changed point of view will it bring 
about ? What will be their attitude toward all the things 
in which all the men and women in the world around 

51 



52 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



them are continually interested? And it is the duty of 
the theosophical exponent to point out how that which 
he advocates will affect men in this practical fashion in 
all the departments of their intellectual activity; and I 
hope tonight, to some extent, at least, to indicate to you 
how Theosophy, if it takes possession of your mind, will 
mould, or modify, or shape, your life, in the outer world 
and in the world of thought, the world of the intel- 
lectual. 

The very first thing that Theosophy lays stress upon 
is the enormous power of thought, and hence the im- 
portance of right thinking. Now, the value of right 
thinking in the modern world is not placed quite so high 
as it ought to be ; largely, I think, because of the reaction 
from the mediaeval view in European countries, where 
such enormous stress was laid on a man's beliefs, and 
when for a man to be orthodox from the standpoint of 
the church was regarded as enormously more important 
than that man's conduct in his relations to his fellow 
men. 

Some of you will remember, during the time of the 
Reformation, the extreme to which that view was 
pressed, — that it mattered little what a man was, com- 
pared to the answer to the question : Does he or does 
he not accept certain religious dogmas, certain special 
forms of thought? And whether you take the Roman 
Catholic Church of the times, or whether you take the 
various Protestant communities, it really makes no differ- 
ence, so far as this bondage of thought was concerned. 

And the words that especially came into my mind at 
the moment were in connection with one of the great re- 
formers ; when it was said in defense of what was sup- 



THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY 



53 



posed to be his wrong thinking with regard to matters 
ecclesiastical, that his living was noble in his relation to 
his fellow men, it was answered that it made wrong 
thought worse than it would otherwise be when it w r as 
served up in a clean platter. Now, you have in that 
one sentence the idea that wrong religious thought be- 
comes more evil when it is accompanied by a noble life. 
You have in that sentence the mediaeval idea as to 
thought and conduct. Conduct was nothing; belief was 
everything. 

Quite naturally, as man claimed greater freedom of 
opinion, as he demanded the right of private judgment, 
these two factors in human life became reversed among 
the more free-thinking communities. And you hear it 
said, even now, nay, very largely now, that it does not 
much matter what a man believes provided his conduct 
is good ; and I am not sure that amongst most men of the 
world assent would not be given to that proposition, — 
conduct is everything ; thinking takes a secondary place. 

You will pardon me if I suggest to you that that is 
as much an exaggeration as the view which was current 
in mediaeval Europe. No one can safely be content with 
wrong or inaccurate thinking. Right thinking is of enor- 
mous importance; and it is not true to say that it does 
not matter what a man thinks provided his conduct is 
right, for in the long run no conduct can be right which 
is not based upon right thinking. Wrong thinking is a 
rotten foundation, and a house built thereon, however 
beautiful, threatens to fall at the slightest shock, the 
smallest earthquake. Right thinking is the foundation of 
noble character. Take it as you find it in the Christian 
Old Testament, "What a man thinks, that he is," Or 



54 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



take it as you find it in one of the Upanishats, "Man is 
created by thought. What a man thinks of, that he be- 
comes and Theosophy proclaims at the very outset 
of its message to the world the enormous importance of 
right thinking. To think rightly is in the future to act 
rightly. To think wrongly is in the future to act badly. 
You cannot separate your thought and your action. A 
man is what he thinks. As another great scripture tells 
us, "A man consists of his faith. What a man thinks,, 
that he is." So we urge first of all on those who listen 
to theosophic ideas, to take care that your thought is 
accurate, is true. 

And remember not only that your thought must be 
right, but that you must constantly place before you an 
ideal, so that that ideal may shape your character, and 
you may reproduce in yourself that on which your mind 
is fixed. Pause for a moment on the word "ideal. n 
What do we mean by it? First of all, a fixed idea, and 
the value or the danger of a fixed idea is recognized 
now in all psychological science. The fixed idea is that 
which dominates the man. An ideal is something more 
than a fixed idea. It is a fixed idea which shapes con- 
duct. And perhaps the most important thing for every 
one of you is to deliberately choose your ideal. Build 
together in thought whatever is to you most admirable 
in human life. Make up your mind what you desire to 
be, for there are many noble ideals, any one of which is 
fit to dominate a life ; but in one life we cannot do every- 
thing. Hence choose deliberately the ideal to which you 
determine to conform your life. For the young among 
you, for the young man, for the young woman., this is 
of all things the most important. In the springtime of 



THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY 



55 



life, while the body was still plastic, the brain still ductile, 
while the expression of thought through its physical 
vehicles is still capable of much shaping, then, then is the 
time to choose the ideal which shall shape the whole con- 
duct of that life. 

Let me take an illustration to show what I mean, and 
how such an ideal works. Most of you probably know 
of the name of Charles Bradlaugh, a well known name 
in English political life. Now that boy was born amongst 
the poor. He had no advantages in the way of educa- 
tion, in the way of early training. He was taken away 
from the primary school that he attended while a lad of 
some ten years of age, and thrown out in the city of 
London to earn his bread; and yet that lad, before he 
was sixteen years of age, had placed before himself an 
ideal that seemed almost mad in its audacity. This poor 
boy, half educated, earning the merest pittance of a 
weekly wage, with nothing open to him whereby his 
education might be improved, what was the ambition 
that that lad put before himself? It was that he would 
one day sit in the British House of Commons and use 
the power that there he would wield in the service of the 
masses of the people from whom he sprang. He dedi- 
cated his life to human service. Born of the people, he 
tried to serve the people, and born in poverty as he 
was, impossible as that ambition seemed, that was the 
ideal that he took as a boy, and worked for as a man, 
which was realized in his maturity, when he took his 
place among the legislators of his country, and helped 
to change the laws that pressed down the workers, that 
made thought less free than it ought to be. He realized 
in his manhood the ideal of the boy. Now, I know 



£6 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



that Charles Bradlaugh was a man of exceptional intel- 
lectual power, exceptional strength of will ; but I only 
take that case as an example that one might multiply 
by the score, or by the hundred perhaps, to show that 
the adoption of an ideal enabled the will to concentrate, 
enabled the life to become so arranged that all the man 
did, all the man struggled for, was directed to the gain 
of power in order that he might serve the people from 
whom he sprang. And so to each of you I say, Have 
an ideal. Do not let your life drift from day to day. 
Don't live from hand to mouth intellectually, or morally. 
Deliberately shape your ideal, and then, by daily con- 
templation, by deliberate contemplation, make that ideal 
formulate itself in your life, until you become the ideal 
that you seek. That is the basis, so to speak, the founda- 
tion of our teaching to the world, — the power of thought. 

Now, what has Theosophy to say in this general rais- 
ing up of the ideal? What has it to say to the world's 
religions? Its message to the world's religions is brief 
and clear. Know your nature, know your innermost 
self ; and in finding yourself you will find God. That is 
the great thought which in the modern world is coming 
more and more to the front. The thirst after God, which 
is the root of every religion, can only be quenched by 
that personal experience in which the spirit in man recog- 
nizes the spirit that is in its origin and its home. Noth- 
ing less than that can satisfy. Nothing less than that can 
quench the perennial thirst of humanity to know its origin 
and its destiny. 

As I was saying to you last night, every sacred book 
the world has known might be torn into pieces ; so long 
as the living spirit of man remains every sacred book 



THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY 



57 



could be re-written, every Bible could be penned once 
more. And the first word that Theosophy speaks to the 
world of religion is this message, that the knowledge of, 
not only the belief in, God is possible for man, — possible 
for the same reason that all knowledge is possible. How 
is it that you know anything of the world outside of 
you? Because your body, which is of the same matter 
as the world around you, has been modified to answer to 
the contacts which come to you from without. If you 
are able to see, it is only because in your eye there dwells 
the ether which responds within you to the vibrations of 
the waves of ether without you that you call light. 
And so with every other sense ; the moment you cannot 
respond, that moment you cannot know. There are 
myriads of vibrations playing on you now, material 
vibrations, waves, in all kinds and densities of matter, 
and you remain unconscious of them, because you have 
not in you the modification that enables you to respond. 
You can only know that which you share. It is true of 
all knowledge. It is true of all religions. It is equally 
true of the knowledge of God. You can only know God 
because you are yourself divine. You can only know the 
universal spirit because you are a portion of that spirit, 
and you know your kinship therewith. Because in man 
God is responding; because the spirit of man is but a 
fragment of the divine ; because in man God is incarnate ; 
therefore you can know, and no longer only hope or be- 
lieve. That is our first great message in the religious 
world —the gnosis, the exact opposite of that agnostic 
position which was so characteristic of science during 
the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 

You remember how Huxley chose the word "agnostic" 



58 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



in order to define his own position, — "without knowl- 
edge.' 5 But not without knowledge in general, Huxley 
being a man of science. No, but without that which 
always in philosophy has been called "the knowledge." 
Knowledge by the senses, Huxley admitted it. Knowl- 
edge by the intellect, Huxley admitted it ; but beyond 
all that man could know by the observation of the senses, 
by the reasoning of the intellect,— beyond that, he said 
knowledge was impossible ; that only by the senses and 
the intellect might man know. And therefore he called 
himself "without the gnosis/' that being the word that 
in all Grecian thought described the one knowledge, the 
supreme knowledge, the knowledge of Him by whom all 
things are known. 

And against that Theosophy proclaims the gnosis. 
That is its greatest message, that is its essence. How, 
you may say, and by what method? By diving deeply 
into the mysteries of your own being. By sinking, sink- 
ing inwards more and more deeply, by stripping off one 
after another all veils and strata of consciousness which 
overlie the eternal spirit within you. You are always 
rushing outward to the world of sense. Cease the out- 
ward rushing and turn inwards to the world of spirit. 
In the ancient teaching the succession of these strata of 
consciousness is given. Strip away, it is said, your 
senses, and you will find your mind. Strip away your 
mind, and you will find the pure reason. Strip away 
the pure reason, and you will find the will-to-live. Strip 
away the will-to-live, and you will find the individual 
spirit. Strip away the limitations of the individual 
spirit, and you will find the universal spirit, — God him- 



THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY 



50 



And hence it has been written, there is no proof of 
the existence of God save the testimony of the spirit in 
man. And it is true. You may argue, but you never 
can argue back far enough to reach absolute demonstra- 
tion. You can make possibility, probability, likelihood, 
every stage of argument, but never demonstration. And 
the only demonstration of the Divine without is the 
Divine within ; and when you know yourself, then, and 
then only, can you know God. 

That is not the only message of Theosophy to the 
world of religion. Religion has always declared a cer- 
tain number of things about worlds invisible, worlds on 
the other side of death, worlds inhabited by angels, arch- 
angels, intelligences of every kind. Every religion has 
made that assertion. 

More than that, every founder of a religion has de- 
clared that he knows about it by first-hand knowledge. 
And those who have surrounded the founders of the 
great religions have made the same claims. Take up 
any book you like of the old Hindu teachings, and you 
will find the continual assertion that knowledge of 
these invisible worlds is possible to man. A man, it is 
written in an old scripture, should be able to strip away 
his body as he can strip away the sheath from the grass 
stalk. So among the Buddhists it is constantly taught 
that the mind can leave the body and know itself without 
the assistance of the body. And when the Buddha was 
teaching he chose a very simple illustration. He said: 
"If you want to go to a town you ask the way there of a 
man who knows the way and has trodden it, and such 
a man will tell you about the town and about the way 
thereto. And you do well,"' he said, "to come to me, 



60 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



and ask me about the heavenly worlds, for I have been 
therein, and I know the way thereto/' And so with the 
Christ. He declared His knowledge of the heavenly 
things, of invisible things, with authority, knowing them, 
and not only by tradition and by hearsay. And so the 
great Prophet of Arabia, Mohammed, the founder of 
Islam, before he w r ent out to give his message to the 
people, traveled to the heavenly worlds and studied them 
under the guidance of an angel. And everywhere, in 
every religion, the same is found. 

But in modern days, each religion has grown weaker 
as men of first-hand knowledge have ceased to appear 
in it; and Theosophy brings back to the world of re- 
ligion the training as well as the theory which enables 
men to learn the secrets of the invisible worlds for them- 
selves and not by hearsay. Now, ask a dozen clergy- 
men, belonging to different communions, what they know 
of a life on the other side of death. What can they tell 
you of the world which we shall inhabit when we cast 
off the flesh? How much will they be able to give you 
of detail? How many can say, as the Buddha said, "I 
have been there, and I know the way thereto"? And 
yet without that your religion will always be a belief and 
not a knowledge. 

And Theosophy declares that such knowledge is no 
more impossible now than it was impossible in the an- 
cient days; that every one of you, if you choose to take 
the trouble, and give the time, and have the conditions 
which every science has to make with regard to gaining 
a knowledge of the science, it declares that you may 
learn this science and practice it and verify for yourself 
what will be the state of the other world and the condi- 



THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY 



61 



tions that are to be found therein. You will find in our 
literature the testimony of writer after writer who de- 
scribes the things he has seen as a man might describe 
them coming back to the home he has left. So it is not 
impossible to look beyond the depth. You are not 
changed after death from what you are now. You will 
be exactly the same the day after you die, every one of 
you, as you are now, except your outer coat of the body ; 
the same habits, the same thoughts, the same feelings, 
the same desires. Nothing you will have lost except the 
outer coat of flesh that you wear. And the next coat, 
the inner one, what you may call the psychic body, if 
you like, you have it now. It is no new thing that you 
will put on at the moment of death, but you are living in 
it now, every day and every moment of your life. Every 
time you go to sleep you leave your physical body on the 
bed, but you do not, most of you, learn to be conscious 
of the outer world when you are living in what we call 
the astral, the psychic, body. And so your sleep is a 
blank, or only troubled by useless and idle dreams. And 
yet, when you wake up from the sleep of death you will 
be then in the body that every night you are constantly 
living in, the body by which you feel, the body by which 
you desire, the body in which are the centers of your 
physical senses, — that wall be your body in the world im- 
mediately after the physical. 

Would it not then be wiser, as you are bound to live 
in it, to learn a little more about it now, to prepare to 
use it, as you must use it then? — so that you should not 
be as the majority of ordinary people are today, when 
they have passed into that other world, bewildered, con- 
fused, puzzled, surrounded with conditions that they do 



62 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



not understand, at a loss to know how to accommodate 
themselves to the changed state that surrounds them. 

Even if you think we are liable to make mistakes and 
teach false ideas, is it not worth your while to turn and 
read the careful records of the observer, of the traveler in 
those worlds of which so little is known here, in case they 
may be true? For if you know it theoretically, then when 
you find yourself there, and recognize the things around 
you as the things you have read of in your past life, you 
will not feel so strange, so lost, so bewildered, as many 
do when they have just cast off the body to which they 
are accustomed. 

So that Theosophy, to the world of religion, brings a 
mass of knowledge of this kind, explains these condi- 
tions, and the experiments by which the statements may 
be verified. And while I would not ask one of you to 
believe because another says that a thing is true, I do ad- 
vise you to acquaint yourselves with what has been writ- 
ten on the subject, and so give yourself the advantage 
of some idea, at least, of what lies before you on the day 
after what we call death. 

One other service Theosophy also renders to religion. 
Having the knowledge of many of these things to which 
allusions are made, it is able to justify and explain many 
of the ceremonies of religion which modern thought is 
too apt to cast aside as mere empty superstition. Now, 
there are very many ceremonies of religion, many sounds 
and sequences of sounds, which have a very real and 
definite value. I do not know how far many of you may 
perhaps have attended some of the services of the Roman 
Catholic Church, but if you ever attended a Roman Cath- 
olic mass, above all, you must, almost inevitably, have 



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63 



felt a certain strange influence coming over you at the 
repetition of certain important phrases in the service. 
There are certain sequences of words, as used in the 
Roman Catholic mass, that have a very peculiar effect 
upon any sensitive person, that make them feel in a 
particular way, throw them into a particular mental con- 
dition. They say they can hardly understand how or 
why the effect occurs. But the thing is simple enough. 
Just as you may stretch a violin string, and then by play- 
ing a note near to that string it will, without being 
touched, sound a sympathetic note on the violin you play, 
so is it with your body, your subtle bodies, and certain 
sounds which can be thus reproduced. Some sounds are 
called mantras, and they play a great part in every an- 
cient religion. Just as the note is reproduced on the 
string sympathetically, so do you throb responsively to 
the sequence of sounds in such a mantra, and they throw 
you into the devotional condition. They make you very, 
very receptive of all devotional influences. And a large 
part of the power wielded by the Roman Catholic Church 
turns on this very fact of the influence exercised by cer- 
tain sounds which are responded to by the subtle bodies 
of those who worship in the Roman Catholic Church, and 
unconsciously to themselves, attune them for the recep- 
tion of its devotional exercises. 

And it is well to understand these things, so that you 
can use them, or guard yourself against them. Your 
bodies are really musical instruments, responding to tht. 
vibrations that surround you continually, and it was not 
without a deep meaning that Pythagoras would admit 
none to his inner school who had not mastered the 
science of music. The science of tones is one of the 



64 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



great helpers to religion in the mind and heart of man. 
It is one of the mightiest of outer powers which may 
be used to elevate or to degrade. Now along that whole 
line, I might spend a couple of hours in giving you the 
details which Theosophy submits to the religious world. 

Let us leave that world and turn to the world of art. 
I sometimes think that great as your nation is, you have 
not yet, so far as the masses are concerned, quite risen 
to the importance of the influence exercised over a people 
by artistic power. Art is one of the great influences by 
which human life and human forms are beautified. It 
was not without sound, rational reason that the Greek 
nation of the older days produced many types of the 
perfect human body. The beauty of the human form is 
largely dependent on the beauty of the objects which sur- 
round the man in daily life. Not only is it true that such 
influences play upon the mother, and through her upon 
the unborn child, but even outside the facts of ante-natal 
life, objects of grace and beauty exercise a very power- 
ful influence upon the men and women who dwell 
amongst them. Among your poorer people, among the 
miserable and the starving, you are breeding races of 
degenerates, because all the surroundings of their life 
are so sordid, so ugly, so repulsive. Art is one of the 
great refining, one of the great purifying, powers in a 
nation. And it is the duty of a young nation, such as 
yours, to realize the powers that lie ready to its hand for 
the building of the nation of the future. Your streets 
should be full of splendid objects of art; not statues 
simply of successful generals, who are not always the 
most beautiful objects on which the eye of the artist may 
rest, but great statues, ideal statues, statues of perfect 



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65 



beauty, of men and of women, those should be the artistic 
schools in your streets, so that the eye may be trained to 
the sight of beauty and the mind may learn to respond. 

For that you must have great artists; and the artists of 
today lack ideals. They are more often copyists than 
creators. The true artist is a creator. He is original. 
It is not the work of a creator to simply copy. Going the 
other day to a picture gallery I saw a number of different 
pictures, some of them heaps of vegetables, heaps of dead 
creatures ready for human beings to feed upon, dead 
ducks, dead turkeys, legs of mutton, hams, strings of 
onions. Now, however perfectly your artist may paint 
a leg of mutton and a string of onions, it is nothing more 
than a leg of mutton and a string of onions after it is 
painted. And those are not elevating objects for human 
contemplation. That is not art. The artist is the man 
who, within the form, sees the life that that form is ex- 
pressing, and paints for us the vision of the life, imper- 
fectly expressed in the form. The great artist of these 
days is not yet born, the man who will be able to open 
your eyes to the inner beauty around you instead of re- 
producing the external form, often vulgar, common, ugly ; 
the man who does that will be one of the redeemers of 
his nation. 

You think it does not matter that in the streets of your 
town of Chicago you build up hideous, common, vulgar- 
looking buildings on which the eyes of your people con- 
tinually rest. I tell you that you are vulgarizing every 
human soul that continually has presented to the eyes of 
its body these ugly objects with which you are continually 
filling your great city. You say, "Oh, it is not practical." 
It is the most practical thing in the world. It is unprac- 



66 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



tical to think only of money, and the gain of money, and 
the building of offices and shops of supreme hideous- 
ness. For by that want of beauty you are building a 
nation which is not a nation of great men and great 
women, great artists and great thinkers, but only a nation 
of great money-grubbers. 

You need to reconstruct your thought of what makes 
the greatness of a nation; you need to reverence beauty 
as one of the fairest gifts of God to man, for God is the 
eternal beauty, and all that is beautiful is an expression 
of his life. And when America gives to the w T orld the 
artist that can reveal the inner meaning of this commer- 
cial age by showing forth what it has in it of true prog- 
ress and splendor, then will America give her message to 
the world and become one of the teachers of the nations. 

And Theosophy says to you: "Learn beauty, idolize 
beauty; honor the artist. " The artist cannot work if he 
is always struggling for bread and cheese. No great 
work of art is done by a man who has to think when he 
begins to execute : "Can I sell it for a good price, so 
that my wife and child and I will be able to live ?" You 
must learn that art is a friend of humanity, and that the 
artist, the producer of the beautiful, is to be honored, to 
be cared for. And you would do well if amongst the 
enormous funds you spend on commercial and technical 
education you would spend something in making the 
artistic life possible, instead of killing off every artistic 
soul that is born amongst you for want of opportunity. 

Pass from the world of art to the world of science. 
What has Theosophy to say to the world of science? 
First, in psychology, the most popular science of the day, 
the most progressive science of the time. Now psychol- 



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67 



ogy has been gathering together masses of facts. It has 
heaped up, one on top of the other, observations without 
number. It talks about the sub-conscious, the uncon- 
scious mind. It lays stress on the power of that sub- 
conscious over the conscious. It tabulates these innumer- 
able observations, but it does not classify them. Theos- 
ophy teaches to what class each of these observations 
belongs. 

I read some time ago the valuable work of Frederick 
Myers on "Human Personality." I found there a mass 
of observations, valuable, carefully arranged and veri- 
fied, but a chaos. What is this "unconscious" or "sub- 
conscious," of which they speak? A heap of rubbish, 
Myers calls it, with a few jewels scattered here and there. 
But surely every true psychologist must realize that he 
must separate his sub-conscious at least into tw r o. He 
must put on one side the whole of that region of the sub- 
conscious w T hich belongs to the past, the dreams of earlier 
peoples, the fears of far-off savages, the thousand voices 
that come to us out of the past, which we have forgotten 
in our brain, but which the sub-conscious memory re- 
tains. That is truly interesting, if we desire to under- 
stand the secrets of the impulses that so powerfully sway 
human nature. But there is another part of that called 
the sub-conscious that is super-conscious and has the 
promise of the future. There is a sub-conscious that is 
the memory of the past. There is also a sub-conscious, as 
it is called, which is the prophecy of the future, those 
glimpses which genius has so frequently shown forth, 
the inspirations that the poet and the artist know, those 
flashes from higher w r orlds which illuminate the darkness 
of the concrete night, those visions of splendor that now 



68 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



and then are glimpsed by the prophet and the seer. 
Those are the super-conscious part of our intelligence, 
for which not yet is built a vehicle whereby it may ex- 
press itself. That higher consciousness, so dim today in 
the most of us, is what we shall be in the future, that 
which is ready to be born. 

A psychologist will never make a road through this 
jungle, will never cut a pathway through this wilderness 
of facts, until he begins to realize that human conscious- 
ness speaks through different forms of matter, physical, 
astral, mental, and matter higher yet ; and that the genius 
is only the man who has organized a higher body than 
is organized by the ordinary man, or w r ho is using the 
powers which all of us possess but which most of us do 
not find under our control. 

Now, I do not ask the psychologist to accept our 
theory. I do advise him to take it as a working hypothesis. 
It is the only one in the field. There is no answer in psy- 
chological science to those problems that are pressing for 
solution. Ours may not be the final answer, but it is at 
least a rational answer, and it would be worth while for 
the psychologist to adopt it as a working hypothesis, and 
then gradually test its veracity, and find out how far it 
is useful in the direction of further research. 

Not only in psychology can Theosophy help ; there are 
physics and chemistry — these are sciences which are ad- 
vancing rapidly, but not as rapidly as they might do, so 
many of the modern problems in physics and chemistry 
need finer instruments than the physicist or the chemist 
possesses. His balance will weigh to the minutest frag- 
ment of the millionth part of a grain, but even that is 
not enough to cope with the minuteness, the infinite 



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69 



minuteness, of nature. He can hardly make instruments 
more delicate. Why can't he use the subtlest of all in- 
struments, the psychic senses, and yoke them to his car 
of discovery? They are beginning to do this in France, 
where the minds of men in these matters are far less 
prejudiced than in Anglo-Saxon countries. You will find 
men in France using clairvoyants m order to discover 
some of the subtler secrets of nature. 

Take the constitution of the atom. How vague science 
is now you will see, if you put together two of the latest 
descriptions which have been given of it, one making it 
consist of innumerable particles, and the latest of all say- 
ing that it consists of only one particle. You have your 
choice, millions or one. Might it not be well to utilize the 
clairvoyant in those discoveries, the man who is able to see 
the atom as you see a table, examine it closely, accurately, 
definitely, just as you can examine the ordinary things 
that you see? You need not take his discoveries for 
granted. You need not regard him as infallible, sure, 
not able to make a mistake; but it seems to me rather 
unwise that chemists do not take the researches of The- 
osophists on these matters, and look to see w r hether or not 
there are avenues of knowledge along which at their 
leisure they may walk. Here again I do not ask for your 
belief. I only ofifer what we have seen and examined as 
a basis for scientific experiment. 

And the science of medicine, what of that? Some 
people say it is no science at all, still entirely empirical. 
Has Theosophy anything to say to medical science with 
regard to investigation and cure ? First of all Theosophy 
would urge on every physician the enormous value of 
utilizing the imagination as a helper in his efforts to cure. 



70 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUBE8 



So often imagination kills or cures, why does not the 
medical profession utilize it much more than it does? "It 
is only imagination/' Yes, but if you find a drug which 
cures a disease, you do not reject it because you do not 
understand it. And why should medicine reject the 
highest curative agent, the power of thought, instead of 
utilizing it to work a cure of disease? 

Look at the experiments which have taken place in 
France in connection with the power of suggestion. If 
you happen to be in Paris at any time you can go 
to the Salpetriere, and they will show you a number of 
pictures, photographs, that they have taken in connection 
with the power of suggestion. You can see photographs 
of burns produced by thought and not by a hot iron, and 
you cannot distinguish the one from the other. You can 
make a lesion by a suggestion. You can take a piece of 
paper and dip it in common water and put it on a man's 
body and suggest that it is a blister, and the water will 
gather and inflammation will appear, and the skin will be 
raised and the blister will be complete. And you can 
take a blister, and suggest it is only a piece of wet paper, 
and it loses its power to irritate, and to produce the blis- 
ter. 

Now, these are ordinary facts, facts of observation, 
that can be repeated over and over again. I have done 
myself by suggestion a number of things, not causing 
lesions, for that I regard as wrong, but by suggestion I 
have made a man blind for the time being, unable to see 
me, while seeing other objects. His eyes could see all the 
objects around him, except those that I forbade him to 
see. And equally as easily you can make a man see a 
thing that is not there, feel an object that has no physical 



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71 



existence, press against a resistant object where the eye 
sees empty air ; or you can make him see through a solid 
wall, and he will tell what is being done on the other 
side ; so mighty is the power of thought, so great the 
force of suggestion. And if the doctors were wise they 
would utilize that power very much more than they do 
now, and would make it their right hand in curative 
methods, instead of leaving it only to the unscientific to 
use, to those who understand little of its nature to em- 
ploy; and so in many other ways. 

Research is necessary for the medical profession; but 
I cannot touch on the relation of Theosophy to the science 
of medicine without entering a word of protest against 
certain methods that Theosophy regards as illegitimate, 
as against all law of right, as an outrage on humanity. 
No knowledge that is gained by torture, by the vivisec- 
tion of the helpless animal, is knowledge which any 
human being has a right to gain or use. You cannot 
separate natural law into various parts and fly in the 
face of one natural law while you are trying to cure 
by means of others. There are means illegitimate, be- 
cause they degrade alike the man who practices them 
and those who take the results of his practice. There is 
a divine law of justice, of mercy, of compassion, and at 
your peril you disregard that law in striving to drag 
from the tortured body of the dying animal some secret 
which nature is veiling from you and which you hope 
to gain by that outrage. 

And there are processes employed in modern medi- 
cine that Theosophy declares to be illogical, the injection 
of disease into a healthy body, the use of those vile fluids 
which are drawn from the animal and injected into the 



72 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



body of a man. Do you realize what you are doing? 
What is your body? It is the temple of a divine spirit 
It has been built by that spirit age after age for the 
showing out of its nobler qualities. Your human bodies 
differ from the body of the animal. From the human at- 
tributes which have shaped them, those bodies are able 
to express the power of compassion, tenderness for the 
helpless, sympathy with the suffering, the realization of 
the duty of the strong to the weak. Those are the 
human qualities which your bodies are being builded to 
express. And if you leave those on one side, and de- 
grade and pollute the body made for such purposes to the 
level, yes, below the level of the brute— for the brute does 
not torture, while man does— your bodies will evolve 
downwards and not upwards, will be built for the ex- 
pression of cruelty, brutality, indifference to suffering, 
and you will ultimately, by the relentless processes of 
nature, go down in the very shaping of your bodies, and 
degrade those that you should hand on to posterity finer, 
nobler, purer. 

Pass from that to my last department, the world of 
politics. Now, what message can Theosophy have for 
the world of politics ? It takes no part in the party poli- 
tics around it. Its members of course can mingle therein, 
but as an organized movement we can take no part in 
party politics, because we belong to all nations, and live 
under all forms of government, and have our duty to do 
in each and in all. But we can lay down certain principles 
which the individual Theosophist should carry out in the 
political life of his town or of his nation. Now I cannot 
as a foreigner venture to touch upon the details of your 
political life, only in one or two broad respects, but I can 



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73 



tell you in this relation the message of Theosophy ; first, 
that the politics of a nation ought to be guided by its 
best men and not by its worst. Now, it is recognized all 
over America that your best men stand aside from polit- 
ical life. Your cultured, intellectual, refined, thoughtful 
gentlemen, what part do they take in the struggles of 
the political arena? When the foreigner says: Is not 
that a neglect of duty? their answer is: How can a man 
go to w r ork which will soil his hands and his conscience? 
But that is no excuse. Is there no Hercules among you 
strong enough to cleanse the Augean stable of politics, 
and make them a fit place for high-minded gentlemen to 
work in for the good of the nation ? For it is a danger 
to your nation, growing to be so numerous and so mighty, 
having to play so great a part in the future history of the 
world. You cannot afford to have your political life con- 
trolled by the ignorant or the self-seeking, and not by 
the intellectual, by the geniuses of your people. The 
politics of a nation give to the nation its place among the 
peoples of the world. In the town, in the state, in your 
federal work, you should have your best men giving 
themselves to the service of the people. A man should 
go into political life not for what he can get by it but for 
what he can give to his nation ; no nation can live which 
has not public spirit, and where is the public spirit of 
America, if your best men stand outside your public af- 
fairs? 

So that Theosophy is bound by its teaching of brother- 
hood to ask you to strive to improve the place where you 
live, the state, the nation to which you belong. The good 
citizen cannot stand aside indifferent and leave evil to 
rule unchecked. 



74 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



Now many people say, and they say truly, that you can 
never make a great nation by mere political methods ; 
that is true. No man has a right to take part in politics 
at all unless he has thoroughly studied economical ques- 
tions, and understands the bearing of economical condi- 
tions on the welfare and prosperity of his nation. You 
are extraordinarily generous, you American people. You 
take from every nation of the world those whom it sends 
out, its poor, its starving, and you allow them to come 
into your free Republic, and, after a brief space, you give 
them the privileges of an American citizen. Be careful 
that the ignorant foreigners, who land here by myriads on 
your shores, do not injure your political life; they need 
training before they should be allowed to share in it. 

It is true that economics lie behind politics, and on a 
sound economical system the welfare and happiness of 
the masses depend. You will think me terribly reaction- 
ary if I say that, believing as we do that wisdom is the 
warrant of authority, we cannot reconcile ourselves to 
the idea that the mere counting of heads, however many, 
is the safest guidance for a mighty nation. 

Citizenship has duties. To guide a nation is more dif- 
ficult than to navigate a ship. But I wonder how many 
of you would venture to cross the Atlantic on a steamer 
where the most ignorant sailor might be put in command. 
You would not risk your life in crossing the ocean unless 
you had a captain trained in the science of navigation. 
And yet the great ship of your mighty Republic you allow 
to be guided by men that are ignorant of political and 
economic science, by men who understand nothing of 
the condition of national life. That is the point that 



THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY 



75 



Theosophy would press upon you, that knowledge has 
the right to rule and not ignorance. 

And out of this wonderful trial of democracy which is 
going on in all countries, and not only in your own, surely 
there will some day come the hour when the lesson will 
have to be learned that the wise are those who ought to 
rule and the ignorant those who have the right to be 
instructed. 

But there is something that lies behind economics. 
There is character. No economic system will make your 
nation strong and free, unless the character of your citi- 
zens is built up to be worthy of a free Republic. For 
just as economics are more important than politics, so is 
character more important than economics. And unless 
there is the training of character there is no greatness 
for the nation. 

You are trying a great experiment in your educational 
methods. You think you can train the boy and girl with- 
out religion, and without teaching any morality. France 
tried the same, and France is reaping the results of her 
blunder. It is no true education which fills the brain 
with thoughts and leaves the heart untrained and unin- 
structed. Noble moral ideals, the placing before the 
growing boy and the growing girl of the noblest exam- 
ples of great living, that is the very essence of right edu- 
cation, and I should be glad to think that every The- 
osophical Lodge in this land made it its duty to try to 
introduce into education religion — wide, undogmatic, ra- 
tional—and morality, the duty of the individual to the 
whole and to the larger self. 

And one great danger Theosophy would point out to 
every nation, rich and strong, as this : Many thousands 



76 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



of years ago a young king came to an ancient dying 
teacher, and asked for some axioms to guide him in the 
government of his realm. And one of the axioms he 
was given has remained in my mind, as vital for your 
Republic as it was vital for that ancient Indian kingdom. 
'''Beware," said the moralist, "beware of the weak. The 
cries of the weak undermine the throne of kings." He 
told him that he might have many an enemy ; his enemies 
he could fight. That he might have many an opponent, 
and his opponents he might overcome ; but the weak — 
the sobbing, starving child, the heart-broken woman, the 
strong man, desperate from misery and starvation — those 
are the things that undermine the prosperity of a nation. 
It is the weak, injured by the strong, who dig the graves 
of a people. It is well for a nation like yours to remem- 
ber that. No nation is great while there exist the miser- 
able and the poor in its great cities. You have slums in 
Chicago that are the scandal of your civilization, as the 
slums of London are the scandal of the English people; 
men, women and children rotting amid conditions not 
fit for any human being to live in and endure. Does it 
ever strike you, as it struck the old divine kings, that the 
poor are those who have the most need of protection, of 
help, of the supply of everything that can make human 
life tolerable, endurable? You want comparatively little. 
You are educated. You have endless sources of amuse- 
ment, of happiness, of culture within yourselves ; but the 
poor have nothing but the outer world, and that outer 
world is denied them. 

It is a false civilization where there is not enough of 
beauty, of pleasure for all. Those who have most in 
themselves should sacrifice and give to those who have 



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77 



nothing. In the older days the right of the poor was the 
first to be considered. His comfort, his amusement, nay, 
even his luxury were deemed to be more important than 
the comfort, the amusement, the luxury of kings and 
nobles. For it was rightly felt that those who have least 
in themselves have need of most from the outer world. 

How different the modern idea. It is the educated, the 
cultured who seek for every new means of pleasure, for 
every fresh luxury in life. Learn the lesson which is the 
most important, for this is the most important, that those 
who have most in themselves are those who are least in 
need of our help. x\nd that is the message of Theosophy 
to modern civilization, because it is the message of 
brotherhood. There is no life for you, any more than 
for any other nation, unless you remodel your civilization 
on the basis of brotherhood, of justice, of love to all. The 
family, that is the right model for the state. The young- 
est child in the family is the one we care for the most 
tenderly. If others suffer, we guard the little child, and 
that is the true model for the state which takes brother- 
hood as its law. The youngest, the most ignorant, the 
weakest are the little children of the nation, and they 
should be considered more than the elders w T ho can guard 
themselves. 

And the last word of Theosophy is this spirit of 
brotherhood. None should be happy and content, while 
one is miserable and degraded. None should feel him- 
self healthy and strong, while one is diseased and de- 
formed. We are all of one life. We are all of one love. 
Poor and rich, weak and strong, we are one humanity 
and we sink or rise together. Believe not that by retir- 
ing to your own wealthy and happy homes and closing 



78 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



your windows against the misery of the wretched you 
insure for yourselves a happy and peaceful life. There 
is no peace while one man, woman or child is living in 
misery and destitution. There is only one life, theirs and 
ours alike, and only as w r e strive for the redemption of 
human misery and the defense of the weak and the mis- 
erable, only then can we hope to be recognized as fellow- 
w r orkers with nature in that great army of the redeemers 
of the world, to whom God and the teachers look as their 
human instruments to do in the physical world that which 
is essentially their right, their duty, and, if they only 
knew it, their highest happiness and their supreme fruit. 



LECTURE IV 



THEOSOPHICAL WORK IN INDIA 

Friends : This evening I shall endeavor to show you 
something of the work the society is carrying on in India. 
It is said that we have too much theory and too little 
practice ; that we are always with our heads in the clouds, 
and do not consider sufficiently the practical needs of the 
people amongst whom we move. It is true that we re- 
gard causes as more important than effects, and in deal- 
ing with evils we try to kill the causes, rather than to 
cut off the branches and leave the roots to produce more 
plants of evil growth. We lay more stress on right think- 
ing than on the details of the application. Nevertheless 
we have a large amount of practice in which we carry 
out our theories. Especially is that the case in the East, 
where outer conditions need so much to be changed. In 
the East the philosophy of life is all right. There theory 
is good enough. It is the practice which is deficient. In 
theosophical work in India we have to consider the con- 
ditions of the people. There we lay less stress on the 
philosophical teachings and more stress on the attitude 
towards life that the teachings ought to produce. I will 
try to run over the outlines of our work there. 

In India our work is chiefly educational. We take no 

79 



80 THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



part in political affairs. In the great college of Benares 
we do not guide our boys to take any special political 
views, but inspire them with a love of country and public 
spirit and a sense of duty to their country, and try to 
make them good patriots, energetic citizens, and to leave 
the details to the time when they will be men with men's 
work to do. 

The religions in India are many and very different. 
Theosophy does not try to convert anybody. It takes 
religion as it finds it, takes it at its best and tries to raise 
the people above superstitition, but does not try to change 
the basis of their religious beliefs. It says, Let the 
Buddhist remain a Buddhist, let the Hindu remain a 
Hindu, let the Mussulman remain a Mussulman, let the 
Christian remain a Christian. We do nothing in the 
way of conversion. I was talking with the Archbishop 
of York a short time ago about Theosophical work in 
India, and he asked me whether the teaching of Theoso- 
phy there led the people to Christianity. I said to him 
that it did not ; that we did not try to convert them. We 
only tried to get the people to live their religion at its 
highest spiritual level. Hence our educational work is 
based on the principle of bringing up the children in the 
religion of the parents. We teach them religion and we 
teach them morality. 

It has been one of the causes for Indian decline that 
they have had a purely secular education with no moral 
training and no appeal to religious influences. And the 
Indian, who above all things is a religious creature, has 
grown vulgar and material under that secular education ; 
I mean those most subject to it, the educated classes, the 
classes who ought to be the hope of India. 



THEOSOPHICAL WORK IN INDIA 



81 



In Ceylon, the island to the south of India, we have 
to deal with Buddhism. Much of the work of Colonel. 
Olcott, the president of the society, he being himself a 
Buddhist, lay in founding Buddhist schools and deliver- 
ing Buddhist children from the hands of the missionaries 
sent out to convert them. It may be a little difficult to 
win your sympathy to a line of work which shows to 
every religion the same respect. But what would your 
own feelings be if you, being a Christian people, had 
others coming in here, occupying the educational field, 
opening schools where they taught your children, and 
as the price of secular education compelled you also to 
swallow the doctrine of Mohammed the prophet? Would 
you not feel that you would be justified in having schools 
of your own? If you w r ere a conquered people, if you 
were under the yoke of a Mussulman power, you would 
understand that the Theosophists came as friends, if 
they helped you to have schools for your own children 
where they could be taught, instead of making your chil- 
dren apostates in order to obtain the secular education 
necessary in manhood and womanhood. 

When Colonel Olcott first went to Ceylon he found 
there was not a solitary school in the island to w T hich a 
Buddhist could go without having his religion insulted 
and the religion of his parents ridiculed in his presence. 
He found there was not a single Buddhist school but 
many missionary schools supported by foreign contribu- 
tions. He also found the missionary schools had taken 
all the best sites on which schools could be built. The 
government, under missionary influence, had passed a 
law that no school might be founded within five miles of 
a school already existing. That meant that no Buddhist 



82 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUBES 



could have a school near any town. All the good sites 
were pre-empted by the missionaries, and the people of 
the country could not have a solitary school save in out- 
of-the-way places which it was impossible for the young 
children to reach. 

The first thing he did was to go before the government 
in London and place before them the iniquity of the law 
which forbade the peaceable enjoyment of their own re- 
ligion by the Sinhalese and the founding of schools for 
the training of their children. The English government 
listened to his plea, and the first thing he accomplished 
for the Buddhist was the repeal of the Five-mile Act and 
the throwing open of the country so they could build their 
own schools on convenient sites for their children. 

He then set to work at establishing schools. Most 
of the Buddhists are poor people. Colonel Olcott went 
up and down visiting village after village. He persuaded 
those peasants, poor as they were, to build for themselves 
schools in which their children could be taught. The 
schools were built. Sometimes they were only tents, 
made out of palm leaves forming a roof, and the stem 
of the tree making the pillar, and the leaves a thatch 
roof. In that way school after school was built. At 
present there are three Buddhist colleges, all flourishing, 
in Ceylon, one at Colombo, one at Kandy, and one at 
Galle. There are 205 Buddhist schools, which are at- 
tended by nearly 26,000 scholars, more than half the 
school-going population, and all children are trained there 
in the religion of their fathers and in reverence for the 
law of the Buddha. I submit that is practical work. It 
is founded and maintained today under the charge of the 
Buddhist Theosophical Society in Ceylon. Three large 



THEOSOPHICAL WORK IN INDIA 



83 



colleges and 205 schools is not a small amount of work 
to be accomplished in the few years during which that 
labor has been going on. And when you consider that it 
has been done out of the pockets of the peasantry for the 
most part, and only to a small extent out of contributions 
by the wealthy, you will be able to estimate the enthusi- 
asm which has revived the people and caused them to 
take an interest in their own religion. The whole of that 
splendid work was carried on by the society under the 
direction of its President. 

That is not the only service done to the Buddhists in 
Ceylon. According to the Buddhist law no man must 
touch intoxicating liquor. Every Buddhist repeats the 
five precepts, one of which is that he will not touch in- 
toxicants. But with the failure of religion, the contempt 
that had been showered on it, the people had grown 
ashamed of their religion and more or less indifferent to 
it. The result was that the English fashion of drinking 
intoxicating liquors spread, and Ceylon became a place 
where the excise tax formed a large portion of the gov- 
ernment's revenue, drawn from the drinking habits of 
the Buddhists, who, by their own faith, were forbidden to 
touch liquor. Such a change has been brought about by 
the revival of and attention to the precepts of their re- 
ligion that now the excise has dropped down to a point 
so low that the Governor has been obliged to tell the 
people that they must find a new 7 source of income, be- 
cause the revival of Buddhism has made the re-establish- 
ment of temperance almost universal, and the govern- 
ment can no longer gather enough taxes from the drink 
supplied to the people. In education, then, and in tern- 



84 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



perance, along those two lines has gone the work in the 
Island of Ceylon. 

Let us cross to India. We come to Adyar. There is a 
class in India called the pariahs, a class of outcasts in 
the fullest sense of the term. They are scavengers, peo- 
ple employed in all the unclean trades, and leading low, 
dirty, disreputable lives, despised by the whole of the 
community, regarded more as animals than as human be- 
ings, living in misery to which all around are indifferent. 

Colonel Olcott was moved to pity by the degraded 
condition of this outcast population. He said it was the 
duty of the Society as a brotherhood to extend a helping 
hand to these unfortunates, for whom no man cared, and 
he decided to open some schools for the pariahs and to 
train them in elementary education so that they could 
take up various positions as servants, butlers, nurses, and 
so on, teaching them cleanliness and decency of life, as 
well as the outlines of a simple education. In that work 
he has been very much helped by one or two Theosophical 
American ladies, who came over to give themselves to 
teaching, and organized the work of the schools. From 
Minneapolis came one of your countrywomen, Miss Sarah 
Palmer, a Bachelor of Science, and devoted herself to 
the raising of these outcast children. And your own 
townswoman, Mrs. Courtright, came from Chicago, 
where she had been working in your slums, in order to 
help this outcast Indian population. Around the Society 
at Adyar we now have five free schools, with upward of 
700 children. And how good the education has been you 
will understand when I tell you that one year 100 per cent 
of the children passed the government examination, an- 
other year 92 per cent, another year 85 per cent. 



THEOSOPHICAL WOKK IN INDIA 85 



The children are good students. They are very bright. 
They only need to be taught. But the difficulty with 
those children is the misery and the starvation in which 
they live. We have to feed them as well as teach them. 
Miserable little skeletons as they are, when they come to 
us the primary thing is to supply them with food. And 
this sort of work you will easily understand if I tell you 
of a single instance. A little girl, eagerly seeking to 
learn, fell fainting on the floor of our school. On in- 
quiry it was found that she fainted from starvation. Her 
parents had given her a tiny copper coin with which to 
buy food. She lived so far away that she could not walk 
to the school, and she gave her food pittance to get a 
seat in a car that might bring her near enough to the 
school to reach it, and, having spent the money on the 
car, she had to starve, and she fainted from starvation. 

When I was last at Adyar and went to a school where 
the children of the scavengers were taught, they arranged 
to show me the athletic exercises that they learned. They 
were proud of their skill, and the fashion in which they 
could perform these little exercises. As I sat looking at 
those little children, little skeletons performing the exer- 
cises, I felt more inclined to cry over their starved bodies 
than to congratulate them on the skill with which they 
performed these various athletic feats. What they want 
is food for the body, and not only for the mind. Before 
the work there has to be a daily meal. So in the poorest 
schools we give them one meal a day that they may not 
suffer more under the training of the brain, unless the 
bodies are fed sufficiently to enable them to resist the 
exhaustion which otherwise overcomes them. That is an- 



86 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



other part of our work in India, this education of the 
pariah population. 

After that we shall come to Benares, the great sacred 
city of Hinduism, where are the headquarters of the 
Indian Section. Most of you will know that our Society 
is a world-wide society, but each great geographical di- 
vision is a center in itself, each organization is autono- 
mous. Adyar is the metropolis of all the divisions of the 
world. Benares is the metropolis only for India. There 
are the headquarters of the Indian Section, which I shall 
be able to show you. There we have our first large col- 
lege in India proper, founded nine years ago, but al- 
ready educating more than 800 boys a year. These are 
boys of the higher classes, who are being trained in the 
best education the West can give them, hand in hand with 
their own religion, hand in hand with morality, based 
upon their own scriptures. Those boys are gradually 
learning not only the ordinary secular teaching that will 
be valuable in the earning of a livelihood but they are 
also learning that the body has to be taken care of, has 
to be strengthened, has to be made vigorous and power- 
ful; for in India it is hard to teach them to play, it is 
easy to teach them to study. An Indian boy studies by 
nature. He is a solemn creature, much more solemn than 
your boys; but in Benares our boys play as well as any 
American boys do. They play cricket and football. They 
have races and athletics of every sort. They call us the 
playing college, and that means much for India. Indian 
physique is going down under the pressure of Western 
education. Indian physique is degenerating, so that when 
a young man is through college and is thirty years of age 
he is what you would call a middle-aged man as far as 



TH.EOSOPKICAL WORK IN INDIA 87 

nerves and vigor are concerned. Hence we lay so much 
stress on the training of the body, that it may be strong 
and vigorous, and that the Indians may become a nation 
able to hold their own among the nations of the world. 

Again, we are training them practically in science. In- 
dian fingers are the deftest in the world, but for many a 
long year all Indian manufactures have been going down, 
and Indian skill has been slowly vanishing. And those 
frightful famines they have are the result which must 
follow in a country where everything in the w r ay of sup- 
porting the population has become agricultural, and where 
there is not the proper balance between the productive 
and unproductive classes ; where there is not the manu- 
facturing industry necessary for the employment of the 
population. All the highly paid posts with regard to en- 
gineering and mechanical occupations are in the hands 
of the white foreigners, and the Indians have only the 
badly paid posts. We are trying to undo that. We are 
trying to take the monopoly of those posts away from 
the whites, drawing Indians away from government serv- 
ice, from law and medicine, and training them on the 
lines of practical applied science, so they may wSrk for 
the material prosperity of their country. We are trying 
to teach them that all forms of labor are honorable, which 
conduce to the welfare of their motherland ; that they 
must learn to look on everything as worthy to be done, 
if well done, and that will make India more prosperous 
than otherwise she would be. We are trying to help 
on the movement towards using products made in their 
own country instead of importing everything from 
abroad, a movement to stop the export of cotton, which 
is so largely grown, to Lancashire, to be sent back in the 



88 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



form of cloth ; to teach the people to weave their own cot* 
ton and make their own necessaries, just as they did in 
the days before England took India as part of the British 
Empire. Those things are the result of the life which 
has been thrown into India by the Theosophical Society, 
by the stimulus that the Theosophical branches are giv- 
ing all over the country. And if India again becomes a 
great country it will be largely to the Theosophical So- 
ciety that she will owe that increased prosperity. 

Roughly, then, that is the outline of our work in India, 
in addition to all the religious and philosophic work we 
do. I will pass on now and try to win your sympathy for 
it by making it a little more real than words can make 
it by the pictures of that Indian life and work that I now 
propose to show you. 

Mrs. Besant then exhibited thirty views of Indian 
scenes and people. The first was that of Madam Blavat- 
sky, the great teacher of Theosophy; Adyar, with iu 
avenue of palms ; the gateway, with some old Indian 
carving, bungalows, hotels, which are no hotels at all, 
being built of palm leaves— a sort of temporary thatch 
house, put up for visitors when they arrive in numbers 
at Adyar. Then came a view of the Adyar Library, with 
its large collection of manuscript, collected by Colonel 
Olcott, which have been translated and given to the 
world; a convention group, the style of dress indicating 
the section whence the people came. Then came another 
convention group of a much larger number of people, 
showing how the attendance had grown. The people 
shown were mostly Hindus. Then came an Indian tailor, 
or dressmaker, whichever you choose to call him, for he 
makes clothes for men or women indifferently — not in- 



THEOSOPHICAL tVOKK IN' INDIA 



89 



differently, for he is a good, a close copyist of any pattern 
submitted to him; but if you want the latest Parisian 
style you must have the pattern for him to go by, and he 
is always a Mussulman. 

The next line of views were of Benares, one a bathing 
scene in the Ganges. Bathing is a part of every Hindu's 
religion. With him cleanliness is not next to godliness 
but a part of it. The first duty in the morning is bathing, 
after which come prayer and meditation. The lecturer 
said that was not always the rule in this country, and, 
judging from experience, she sometimes wished it was. 

Next were several views of Hindu temples. In India 
there is little congregational worship— it is all individual. 
If the temple is crowded it is because each goes for his 
own individual prayer and meditation. The only con- 
gregational form is sacred singing. Hundreds will gather 
to listen to the singing of a story or the acting of a re- 
ligious drama ; but the worship is individual. Hence the 
temples are small, but there are large numbers of them 
within a small area. 

Then came a view of funeral pyres. Immense heaps 
of wood are piled up, often scented woods, and over them 
large quantities of butter is spread or oil is poured ; the 
body is placed on the pyre and set afire. The dead are 
thus burned almost immediately, always within a few 
hours after death, and the cemetery is a slope on the 
banks of a river, where daily the fires may be seen burn- 
ing. Then came a picture of the Theosophical headquar- 
ters in Benares, built within the last eight years. On the 
beautiful shrubbery in the garden surrounding the build- 
ing is placed the washing to dry, for laundry work here 
must be done every day, and clothing changed daily, to 



90 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



maintain cleanliness. There was also a view of the Hindu 
College at Benares, and the boarding house of the The- 
osophists ; also the portrait of the Hindu Secretary of the 
College. 

There were groups of students who spent their vaca- 
tions going about the country collecting funds for the 
college. When the wealthy boys here win a scholarship 
they turn them over to the poor boys to help them along 
in their education. There were exhibited several group 
views of the staff of the school and its teachers and offi- 
cers and athletic teams. Provincialism is strong in India. 
The work of the Theosophical School has done much to 
break down this provincialism by bringing students to- 
gether from the various States, and interesting them in a 
common work. 

The visit of the Prince and the Princess of Wales, a 
few years ago, was pictured on the screen, and the com- 
pany of Indian boys who formed the guard of honor when 
royalty visited the college. Then came a group view of 
girls attending the girls' school. Indian women formerly 
were well educated. Of late years they have not been 
educated at all. The Theosophists are giving their atten- 
tion to the education of woman in India. 

The last view was of the officers of the Theosophical 
School at Shrinagar, Kashmir, meaning 'The blessed 
city." 

After the pictures had been shown Mrs. Besant con- 
tinued as follows: 

That will give you some idea of the kind of work we 
are now carrying on in India under the Theosophical 
Society. Of course, it is carried on in conjunction with 
a large number of people who are not members of the 



THEOSOPHICAL WORK IN INDIA 



91 



Society. Our work is this : Our leaders gradually train 
first our own members, and then their friends, in carry- 
ing on their own business in their own way. It is a 
great movement in the East for keeping the people East- 
ern, and at the same time giving them everything of value 
that the West has to give. It is a national movement. 

And if you at all realize the significance to the world 
at large of the change that is now coming over Asia you 
will realize something of the importance of the work that 
the Theosophical Society is carrying on in India. For a 
very long time past, for two centuries at least, Asia has 
been the prey of the West, her lands taken, her people 
enslaved, the nations of the East looked on only as new 
markets for the West. In this extraordinary injustice, 
in which, I am sorry to say, your Republic takes part as 
well as the Europeans, where the white man claims the 
right to occupy the countries of the colored man, and 
to force on the colored man his products, his manufac- 
tures, even in the face of the European nations going to 
war in order to force the ports open, and open up the 
markets, the white nations refuse to the colored man an 
answering hospitality, and close their gates against the 
colored brother, while they insist the colored brother shall 
open his doorway to thern. That is hardly fair. If, as is 
the case, so many of your own people swarm over India 
and are welcome there, it is rather hard when the Indian 
comes here that he should be looked upon, as in so many 
cases, as an intruder. 

As the changed spirit in India, in Asia, spreads you 
will have to learn to meet these men on equal footing, and 
realize that a white skin gives no right to terrorize 
over a colored skin. The Indian civilization, while not 



92 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



so mechanically luxurious, is quite as great a civilization 
as yours ; on some points far nobler, on other points less 
developed. The object of the Theosophical Society is 
that in this leveling of the East and West, this coming 
together of the colored and white races, they may meet 
as brothers ; that they may realize the mutual use they 
may be to each other, instead of the one being the plun- 
dered and the others being the plunderers. We hope 
gradually that you of the West will understand that the 
East has much to give you, and that you have much to 
learn from it, as well as the fact that you have much to 
give to the East, and that the East has much to learn 
from you. 

In your Parliament of Religions here in 1893 you saw 
something of what the Indian is from the religious and 
philosophical standpoint. You saw how wonderful was 
his spirituality, the sublimity of his religious thought ; and 
may it not be that the Indian has to spiritualize the West, 
as the West has to carry science and mechanical power 
to the East — a fair exchange. You will profit by what 
comes from the East, as well as the East will profit by 
what you carry to its lands. 

And I want tonight to express the hope, if you will 
allow me, that you may take away from this lecture the 
idea that the East and West should be drawn together 
by bonds of mutual service, of mutual instruction, of 
mutual benefit. How great are Eastern possibilities only 
those of us who have lived there a large part of our lives 
may realize; how valuable the interchange of thought we 
cannot but continually proclaim. 

And I want, if I can, to win a little of your sympathy 
for this work of the Theosophical Society which is going 



THEOSOPHICAL WORK IN INDIA 



93 



on in that far Eastern land. It is an uphill struggle. All 
these great buildings that we have seen have for the most 
part been built out of Indian money, but helped now and 
then by generous people in other lands. And I have 
sometimes thought that it may be possible that some of 
your wealthier people may let their generosity outflow 
American boundaries, and white-face boundaries, and 
help the educational movements that are going on in 
India under the auspices of the Theosophical Society. I 
believe in doing that good would come, both to giver 
and receiver. 

You must remember that India is the mother of re- 
ligions, and her spirituality is the loftiest spirituality on 
earth. Your Emerson had the only copy of an Indian 
book which existed in America, when he wrote those 
priceless essays of his, and Emerson's essays are pregnant 
with the spirit which he drew from Eastern sources. And 
so with other great Indian books of philosophy, of re- 
ligious and spiritual thought ; they will enrich your think- 
ing, and they will bring to you what you want in your 
Western civilization, the sense of the value of the spirit, 
the sense that the body should be a servant and not a 
master. 

One word of thanks I will say to all you who have 
come here tonight, because in coming you will have 
helped our work. As you know, the whole proceeds of 
the lecture go to the helping of this educational work in 
India; so I feel I am bound to thank you not only for 
the attention which you have given to the account of 
the work so dear to my own heart, and so valuable to 
large numbers of your Eastern brethren, but also for the 
material assistance that I shall be able to tell my Indian 
boys has come to them from the city of Chicago. 



PART II 



ANSWERS TO THEOSOPHICAL 
QUESTIONS 



ANSWERS TO THEOSOPEICAL QUESTIONS 



The following questions (among others), written and 
oral, were put to Mrs. Besant, to which her answers were 
as follows : 

Mrs. Besant: I wish to say with regard to a Ques- 
tion Meeting, that what I do is generally this : I take the 
questions as handed in. When I have answered one I 
stop for a moment, and if the answer is not clear some 
one may press the question a little farther. And please 
do not hesitate if you are not satisfied with the answer to 
put another question on the same subject, or press for an 
explanation. I do not in the least object to being pressed ; 
I would far rather you would do that than leave anything 
in doubt, because sometimes I may answer briefly and 
the answer may not be perfectly clear. 

Question — Are physical atoms in evolution and do they 
become conscious entities? 

Answer— A physical atom is evolving, but the con- 
sciousness which is working in that atom is the conscious- 
ness of the Third Logos, the Holy Spirit of the Christian 
faith. In that atom, as such, the ordinary physical atom, 

97 



98 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



there is net a "monad'' in connection with it. And the 
evolution which is going on is an evolution in complexity, 
and in the gradual bringing into activity of the spirillas, 
as we call them. You may remember the pictures that 
we published of the atom. The evolution of the atom 
proceeds with the rounds, and one after another a spirilla 
is brought into activity, so that the physical atom of the 
moment has four spillas active. 

In addition to that there is an evolution that goes on 
in connection with the chemical atom. As those atoms 
come into what are called organized bodies they to some 
extent change their method of combination. The matter 
has not yet been looked into very fully, but the ordinary 
carbon atom that you get in a diamond is not exactly the 
same as the carbon atom that you get in the human body. 
When it passes out of a human or animal or vegetable 
body the carbon atom returns to its mineral condition, but 
takes up the animal or human or vegetable condition more 
quickly than it did on the previous occasion. So you have 
a double evolution going on in that way. But neither 
evolution is in touch with what we call a "monad" ; that 
is, with a spiritual entity which will pass on into the 
human form during the present chain. Of course, the 
permanent atoms that the monads appropriate evolve 
much more rapidly than the unappropriated atoms ; so it 
is rather a complex question that is put, which you must 
study at length if you would thoroughly understand it. 
Quite broadly, the evolution of the atom is an evolution 
at a comparatively early stage, and only in future worlds 
and universes will the atoms of the present become fit to 
serve as vehicles for entities. 

Question— Will Mrs. Besant please advise the parents 



ANSWERS 



99 



what they should do in regard to the vaccination ques- 
tion? The children are compelled by law to have this 
done every seven years or they cannot attend school. 

Answer — I cannot, of course, give you a definite state- 
ment as to the theosophical position, so to speak, in re- 
gard to vaccination. I can only give you my opinion, and 
you must not suppose my opinion is one which the mem- 
bers of the Society need in any way accept. It is an indi- 
vidual opinion entirely. I am dead against vaccination. 
I have gone carefully into it. I think it causes more 
diseases than it cures; and the general principle of inject- 
ing foul matter into healthy bodies is a profound physi- 
ological mistake. That view is not only based on a fairly 
careful examination of vaccination statistics but also on 
the broader fact that in some countries, like France, where 
injections are very much more largely used than they 
are in other countries, quite a new crop of diseases is 
appearing in connection with this very widely used custom 
of injection of all kinds. Some two years ago some Pa- 
risian doctors held a gathering amongst themselves in 
order to look into the question as to the general effect on 
the health of the community of this widely spread custom 
of injecting drugs into the human body, and the opinion 
tended in the direction that it was doing more harm than 
good. One principle I think it might be worth your while 
to look into. The human body has been built up through 
millions of years, and its various processes have been 
very, very slowly evolved. The process by which materials 
are taken into the body for healthy assimilation is carried 
on by the digestive apparatus, and it is a very doubtful 
question whether throwing directly into the blood crude, 
undigested products may not be so repellant to the body 



LOFC 



100 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



as to cause various forms of disorganization. I am only 
putting this tentatively to you. Is it not probable that all 
matters which ought to reach the blood in a healthy and 
useful way ought first to be put through the analysis of 
the digestive and the glandular assimilative organs? I am 
inclined to think that that is a matter that doctors ought 
to consider very carefully. As I say, that is only tenta- 
tive; but this process of throwing into the human blood 
all kinds of products drawn from animal and other 
sources is a process that, stated broadly, ought to be 
wrong; whether it proves to be so by observation will 
have to be a matter of long experiment. My advice to 
Theosophists is, keep away from the modern practice of 
injection and try to keep your children aw-ay from it. 
If it is the law here that no child shall be allowed to go to 
school who is not vaccinated every seven years, then you 
ought to try to change the law. In England, where the 
law used to be compulsory, the objection of the conscien- 
tious parent is now regarded. They do not send the 
parents to prison, as they used to do by the score, because 
they refuse to put vaccine matter into the bodies of the 
children. The parent is allowed to protest, and, after a 
certain amount of pressure, he is allowed to have his own 
way. Certainly in a country as nominally free as yours 
you ought to be allowed to go as far as in monarchial Eng- 
land. But in any case I think you might press on the at- 
tention of those interested in these things, that if vaccine 
be a protection against smallpox, and you prefer smallpox 
to vaccination, you might be allowed to follow your own 
peculiar notion, as the vaccinated persons are, by the 
hypothesis, protected against infection. Personally, to me, 
it is a choice between smallpox and certain forms of dis- 



ANSWERS 



101 



ease which have followed vaccination, and I should prefer 
leaving my diseases to Karma without vaccination. You 
must use your own intelligence on this. One cannot lay 
down a law. 

Question — Is the protest in England effective ? 

Answer — Yes ; it is now. Anti-vaccinators are allowed 
to guard their own children. They are called up, and if 
they swear they have conscientious objection they let 
them go. 

Question — Why is Theosophy so beautifully expressed 
by the mouth, yet so poorly expressed in the life? 

Answer — That is the case, I am afraid, with all great 
teachings. Human beings are very imperfect, and they 
can see the beauty of an idea before they are able to carry 
it out in practice. It is a great thing even to see it, be- 
cause seeing it today means you will practice it in the 
future. But I am afraid practice will always lag behind 
precept. Where thought begins, practice follows, and the 
real practical answer is : Let each individual member 
endeavor to make Theosophy as beautiful in life as it is 
in words. 

Question — What is meant by being "glamored" ? What 
are the symptoms and what is the cure? 

Answer — "Glamored" is a word which, in the general 
sense, would mean having the thought of another im- 
pressed on one from the outside, a form of hypnotism, or 
suggestion — that is the ordinary sense. Then there is 
the sense in which it is sometimes technically used in con- 
nection with the black magician. He may be able to pro- 
duce so strong an appearance that anyone seeing that ap- 
pearance would be deceived by it. "Glamored" means 
being deceived by appearance, but it is used in a very 



102 THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 

special sense where one person deliberately throws over 
another a suggestion which forces that person to accept 
the suggestion as though it were true. It is a form of 
black magic, really. 

Question — If truth is absolute and it is only our con- 
ceptions of it that are relative, is not morality — which is 
simply truth as applied to man's duties towards others 
and to himself — also absolute? Thus, is not right al- 
ways right, and wrong always wrong from the highest 
point of view, no matter what our beclouded vision may 
make them seem to us now? 

Answer — Truth is absolute, but all our conceptions of 
it are relative. "Is not, therefore, morality— which is 
truth applied to man's duties towards others and himself 
— absolute ?" The moment you apply it to man's duties 
towards others and himself it obviously becomes relative. 
The question is philosophically a blunder in thought. 
Nothing which is applied can be absolute. It immedi- 
ately becomes relative when applied, and all morality is 
relative, just because it is a question of duties in relation 
to others. There is no such thing as what is called abso- 
lute morality ; for when you reach the region of the abso- 
lute morality disappears. It is always a question of rela- 
tions, a man's relations to another. The right relation is 
morality. The wrong relation is immorality. There is 
always relation, and it is very important for Theosophists 
to understand that, because in the evolutionary process 
that which is right at one time becomes wrong at an- 
other. The only real definition of right is that which is in 
accord with the Divine will in evolution. That is Right. 
Now, during all the early part of evolution, separation is 
the Divine will. Otherwise you would not have a universe. 



ANSWERS 



103 



The one must become many. So it is "right" to separate. 
It is the will which makes the universe, that demands sep- 
aration. Morality, then, is separateness at that period. 
Later on evolution becomes unifying. When the middle 
point is turned, and the universe is growing toward 
unity, then separation becomes wrong, and unification 
right. I have taken a broad case simply to show the prin- 
ciple. A more practical way of looking at it would be 
this : There are things which are right for the savage 
that are entirely wrong for you. Experience, as long as 
it is useful, is right for any special individual. I suppose 
I shall state a very startling proposition if I tell you there 
is a stage in evolution where to kill, that which is now 
committing a murder, means a useful experience, a 
growth. Only by the many killings can a man learn 
that killing is wrong ; but when you have once learned it, 
then killing becomes "murder," and it becomes wrong to 
murder. Experience has been gained, and that step up- 
ward has been taken. Morality is really like a ladder. 
The rungs above you, those are moral; the rungs below 
you, those are immoral ; and it depends where you are on 
the ladder whether a particular action for you is right or 
wrong. 

Question— Is it right or wrong, then, to discourage 
murder in our Society? 

Answer — Thoroughly right. One of the reasons is that 
when an experience has been gained, that which was be- 
fore necessary becomes unnecessary. Once the sacred- 
ness of life is recognized killing becomes murder, and 
murder is wrong, and then all good people must teach 
against it, must prevent its taking place. If you think it 
out you will see how that works. You cannot say it is 



104 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



wrong for a lion to kill a deer. It is not "murder" ; it is 
not wrong of the lion. He has not reached the stage 
where he can distinguish right from wrong. He has to 
grow into it, and only by doing things that in a higher 
stage would be wrong can the distinction between right 
and wrong be learned. No sensible person will say that a 
lion does wrong when he kills a deer, because he has not 
reached the stage where morality is possible for him. 
Question — How about the deer? 

Answer — You cannot say it is wrong for the deer to be 
eaten; it may be unfortunate for the deer, but he also 
learns by it. I took the illustration in order that every- 
one might be able to see clearly that morality is a special 
stage in evolution. 

Question— Is it right for the deer to be eaten? 

Answer — The lion might think so. 

Question— He might think so, but if we consider it 
broadly it is not? 

Answer — Xo ; it all works towards good. 

Question— What about the man that kills the deer ? 

Answer — Ah/ that is a different matter! That will 
depend on the stage of the man's evolution. If he has 
risen to the spiritual stage, then it is wrong for him to 
kill the deer. In the savage stage you cannot say it is 
wrong. He doesn't know any better. 

Question — Would you punish a man who did right 
when he murdered? Can you punish a man for being 
right ? 

Answer — I would certainly punish — if you like to use 
that word — the man who at the present stage of evolu- 
tion commits murder, and I would do it in order that his 
evolution might be more rapid. When a majority sees 



ANSWEES 



105 



an act to be wrong and the minority has not yet reached 
the average level, the evolution of the minority may be 
quickened by penalties attached to crimes. I should not 
hang him. I would not commit murder myself in order 
to teach him the sacredness of life. 

Question — You would punish him for doing right? 

Answer — I would teach him better, but I should not 
severely punish a man at the savage level. 

Question — I suppose you state that because human 
government is imperfect? If you had a perfect govern- 
ment you would not punish that man. If able to treat 
with the principle, you would not punish the ignorant? 

Answer — No; I would put him under discipline, for 
to my mind the ignorant man has a right to training and 
discipline, I should not punish him criminally by com- 
mitting him to jail for a definite period any more than 
I would commit a smallpox patient to a hospital for a 
definite period. I would send him there until he was 
cured and keep him under discipline until he could rule 
himself. 

Question — Is it just as hard to punish an innocent man 
who has taken life as it would be to punish a somnam- 
bulist who has taken life while asleep? 

Answer — I do not like the word "punish." I would 
look on a man who committed murder in a civilized 
community as a diseased man morally, a man below the 
level of the community. I would try to cure him. I 
would not let him go loose to practice murder on his 
neighbors. 

Question — Would you correct the man? That is what 
I mean. 

Answer — Yes; I would, certainly. 



106 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTTJKES 



Question — Teach him a lesson? 
Answer — Yes. 

Question- — You would not hang a man ; you think it is 
wrong ? 

Answer— I think it is wrong. To commit another mur- 
der to correct one already done is foolish. 

Question— Should you not say it is the office of man 
or humanity not to punish anybody but simply to restrain 
and teach ? It is not ours to punish. 

Answer — I do not think it is anybody's place to punish, 
but restraint and teaching would very often be called 
punishment in ordinary conversation. That is why I 
guarded myself a little in my words. 

Question— If Christ is the priest of the Fifth Race, 
who is the king? 

Answer— I am not aw r are that Christ, in the ordinary 
sense of the word, could be called the priest of the Fifth 
Race. I don't quite know what the writer of the ques- 
tion meant by the word Christ. There is a perhaps not 
widely known truth with regard to the great Christian 
Teacher. There is a distinction between Jesus, the Man, 
and the Christ. During the three years of ministry the 
body of Jesus, the Man, was tenanted by a very lofty 
Being, who is, in a very real sense, the Priest of the 
Fifth Race, the one who will be the Buddhi of the next 
Race. During the three years of the ministry the Ego 
whom we call by the name of Jesus gave up His body 
for that purpose. He w r as re-born, and it is in the hands 
of that Ego that all the Christian communities are. Of 
course, that is a technical question, only one really for a 
theosophical meeting. I don't know how far many of 
you have read along the special lines which would make 



ANSWERS 



the matter quite intelligible. The Christ and Jesus are 
not the same. That was well know r n in the early Church 
among the Gnostics. If you mean the Christ, in the real 
sense, He is a very lofty Being in the Occult Hierarchy, 
and He is not the Teacher of the Christians only, but of 
all the world. 

Question— If the Christ was that lofty person, was He 
human at one time? 
Answer — Oh, yes. 

Question— Whom do you mean by the Buddha of the 
next race? 

Answer— There is one great Being in every root race, 
who reaches the altitude of perfect illumination, and 
before he reaches it he holds a position that is called that 
of the Bodhisattver, the one great teacher of the whole 
world. Now, it was that one great teacher of the whole 
world who, during the three years of the ministry, inhab- 
ited the body of Jesus. Such teachers are worldwide; 
they are not confined to one religion. 

Question — If Christ was not of our race, do we under- 
stand He was of our humanity. 

Answer — Gautama, the Buddha, was the first of our 
humanity to reach that height, and the next Buddha also 
belongs to our own humanity, to this globe. 

Question — That is the Christ? 

Answer— That was the Christ. Of course, you must 
always remember that there is a sense in which the term 
is used among Christians in which they mean by the 
word Christ the Second Logos. That is sometimes meant 
by Christians, the second person in the Trinity, or, as 
we should say, the second Logos. 

Question — May I ask if that Ego, Jesus, is in human 



108 



THEOSOPHXCAL LECTUEES 



form? do I understand you, that He is in charge of the 
Christian religion at the present time? 

Answer — Yes, at the present time. 

Question — Of course we cannot know more than that? 

Answer — I am afraid I should not say more. He is 
one of the Masters. 

Question — -Is the Ego self-conscious on its own plane 
during the time it is working through a physical brain as 
a self-conscious entity? 

Answer — Yes. There is only one consciousness, that 
of the Self. According to the density of the matter in 
which it is working will be the manifestation of its power. 
The Ego working through the matter of his own plane 
will have a range of consciousness enormously beyond 
that which he can show in the physical body; and if he 
is developed to the point when he can work freely in 
mental matter, then he will be conscious of the unity of 
himself all the way down through the astral and physical 
bodies. Through all, there is but one consciousness work- 
ing up and down. Thus to an advanced Ego, the mental, 
the astral, the physical bodies will be all one body of dif- 
ferent densities, just as the solid, liquid, gas and ether 
in your bodies are to you all one body. You do not think 
of working through the solid, liquid or gaseous parts; 
you use the whole of them. So it is with an Ego who is 
fully self-conscious on his own plane. He is there all the 
time, and works in all three bodies together as one body. 
If he is not evolved far, he is dimly conscious of himself 
on that plane, but not of his surroundings. He knows 
himself. He is open to all influences from above; but 
he is not conscious of the beings on that plane, nor of its 
objects. He has not yet sufficiently mastered his vehicle 



ANSWERS 



109 



to oe able to use it as a vehicle of consciousness. 

Question — Is it possible that the vehicle of the astral 
body can be more developed than the physical body? 

Answer— Quite possible. 

Question — Without the physical body knowing any- 
thing about it ? 

Answer— You may have many cases in which a person 
is using on the mental and astral planes his mental and 
astral bodies, without his being conscious of that use on 
the physical. There are cases where the past life has 
made a physical body necessary which cannot be brought 
into close rapport with the astral and mental planes. He 
would not on the physical plane have the consciousness 
he has on the other planes. The physical body would be 
one which would not allow him to express those higher 
qualities. 

Question— How do you account for the slow growth 
of the Theosophical Society as compared with the reli- 
gious bodies? 

Answer — I should challenge the statement. Suppose 
you go back in Christianity to the first century of its life ; 
it had not spread to one-hundredth part of the extent that 
the Theosophical Society has spread. There were very 
few people who were Christians during the first thirty 
years of its preaching. Look at them now; they have 
spread over the greater part of the civilized world. I 
regard our growth as remarkably rapid. But the point 
of real interest — and perhaps that is the thing which 
would really answer the question — is that you cannot 
measure the growth of a society merely by the number 
of people that come into it, but by the spread of the 
ideas for which the society stands. Now compare the 



110 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



world of thought in 1875 with the world of thought 
to-day in regard to all religious, intellectual and scien- 
tific questions, and you will find a great revolution has 
taken place. The ideas that in 1875 were thought absurd 
and ridiculous are now becoming commonplace amongst 
all well informed people. The growth of Theosophy— 
and that to me is the most important part of our work — 
is very great; its ideas are spreading everywhere and 
are being echoed everywhere, and I should be exceed- 
\Tingly glad if it were possible that the Theosophical So- 
ciety should be in close and friendly relations with all 
the many bodies that are now making the propaganda 
of its own ideas. Then the world would marvel at the 
growth of these ideas. 

Question— What is the cause or object of a Manvan- 
tara? 

Answer— A manvantara is a period of manifestation, 
and any special period may have a special cause. But 
most of the questions of that class are, I think, founded 
on a misconception of what manifestation is. I am going 
to start with what seems to be a truism. You all exist; 
that, you will say, you know. But I very much doubt 
if there are many of you who do realize what existence 
means, and realize that everything which exists is in 
existence always, though only one part or another may 
be in manifestation at any particular time and place; 
there is no sense in asking: Why is there manifesta- 
tion? There is always manifestation and non-manifes- 
tation of parts. Everything always exists, and one part 
or another is always appearing or disappearing. So you 
might as well ask : Why is there non-manifestation ? 
There is this great turning wheel, as it were, in which 



ANSWERS 



111 



a universe appears and vanishes, but always is. You 
should grasp that fundamental root idea of philosophy: 
there is always existence, or else existence could never 
appear. Grasp that thoroughly, and you will never ask 
why did God create a world, and so on. Always exist- 
ence is, and in regard to that which always is, no ques- 
tions of origin are reasonable. You are face to face 
with the fact of existence. You exist. That is what we 
can start with. Existing once, we must always have existed 
and must always exist ; but whether we are in manifesta- 
tion at any particular time or place, that is a different 
thing. The all exist s simultaneously in eternity, and is 
manifested in succession in time and space. Why a 
particular universe exists at a given time and place, 
only its Logos could say. Why did he bring out that 
particular universe? Only he himself could give the 
whole reason. We can see many reasons, but not the 
whole. The question would be really: Why did he 
choose such and such form of manifestation? The gen- 
eral answer to the question of the creative action of a 
Logos would be that ainife takes joy in self-ejcgression. 
You find it in yourself. You find it in an artist, — the 
joy of creating ; that is, of expressing outwardly the life 
that is in you. That is, of course, the ultimate reason 
for every individual universe — the will of a great Life to 
show itself out, to manifest itself. 

Question — Does not the self-expression of the Logos 
imply suffering on the physical plane? 

Answer— Certainly, in this universe. 

Question— Then it is not all of joy? 

Answer — Oh, that depends how you look at it. It may 
not be joy for the moment to the form that is suffering, 



112 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



but that suffering is as unimportant from the wide stand- 
point as, say, putting a child into a room to learn a les- 
son. The child would rather play about outside, but in 
the child's education and growth and development the 
restraint is necessary. Even we, small as we are, look- 
ing back over our lives, I think, are more glad of the 
sorrows in them than of the joys in them, because all 
the sorrows mean power. I know that is my own 
experience in a very stormy life. 

Question— What is the basis of the E. S.? 

Answer — I can only answer the question very partially 
here; the Theosophical Society has always existed in 
grades, so that a person may pass out from one grade 
into another to learn more; and knowledge learned in 
one is the necessary basis for admission to the other; 
the general object is to enable those who have mastered 
ordinary theosophical studies to go further on in their 
studies, and also by instruction in the methods of medi- 
tation, and so on, to enable them to lead a more spiritual 
life than otherwise perhaps they would, or make it easier 
for them to do so. It is putting certain knowledge pos- 
sessed by the elder at the service of the younger. That 
is the general idea of it. 

Question — But intellectual acquisition of such knowl- 
edge alone is not sufficient? 

Answer — No. 

Question — What effect upon the etheric body is pro- 
duced when the dense body is suddenly shattered, as in 
the case of an explosion? 

Answer — None at all. The force of the explosion, 
which would be gaseous, does not affect the higher mat- 
ter. The ethers would remain, only the dense particles 



ANSWERS 



113 



would be torn away from their place in the etheric 
matrix, but it would not affect that matrix. 

Question — What effect does an anesthetic have upon 
the physical, etheric and astral bodies? 

Answer — Most of the anesthetics we use, chloroform, 
ether, and so forth, force the etheric body out of the 
dense physical to a large extent. 

Question — Please state that again. 

Answer — The effect of chloroform or ether is to drive 
the greater part of the etheric double out of the dense 
physical body. With the etheric go the astral body, 
and the higher bodies. Part of the etheric body is left 
in the dense physical, but the greater part of it is driven 
out ; so that generally a person under an anesthetic is 
not vividly conscious of anything around him above or 
on the physical plane. I once very foolishly took laugh- 
ing gas to have a tooth out, and I found, when I was 
outside, that it was exactly as if I were standing in a 
very, very dense fog. The etheric double is not capable 
of acting as a vehicle of consciousness separately, and 
it was just as though I were completely enveloped by a 
thick fog, through which I could see my body lying in 
the chair, the dentist, and so on. It is quite different 
when one is out in the astral body, leaving the etheric 
behind. I have seen two or three people under the influ- 
ence of an anesthetic, and it was always the same thing. 
The person comes out in the etheric double in a sort of 
dreamy, sleepy condition, and drifts about, as it were. 
The astral body is not affected, of course, by the chloro- 
form, but it goes out with the etheric. 

Question — When a person is mesmerized, what hap- 
pens? 



114 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



Answer — A mesmerist sometimes drives out the 
etheric body, but more often the astral body. He can 
drive out a part of the etheric double, as is done by 
a drug ; but more often he drives out the astral. 

Question — How does he proceed? 

Answer— That depends on what he wants to do. If 
he is mesmerizing to heal, then he would not drive out 
the etheric double or astral at all, but would simply pour 
in some of his own vitality into the physical aura. 

Question — What is the chemical process of driving 
out the etheric body by ether? Are our ethers as fine 
as the etheric body? 

Answer— It drives it out, but I have never closely 
examined the process, so as to see exactly what it is. I 
do not know. I have only observed that it drives the 
etheric out, as when you pour out water through a pipe, 
it may carry along things in the pipe in front of it. But 
I never looked closely into it to see what is done. I 
suppose there is a repulsive action between the particles, 
but I do not know. 

Question— If a Master were to come out into the 
world would he proclaim himself a Master? Why? 

Answer — As a rule he does not so proclaim himself. 
A Master might be in the world and amongst people 
without being recognized. For instance, take the great 
Masters who are in the Himalayas now. The people 
about them know them by sight, but they only look on 
them as very holy men. The people have a very great 
respect — that is the Eastern way — when a man is be- 
lieved to be holy; but they go about in Tibet, and they 
are just regarded as Yogis, in the ordinary Eastern 
fashion. One of those great teachers came over to 



ANSWERS 



115 



London in 185 1, with an embassy that came from the 
North to London. He was not known as a Master. It 
would be very seldom that a Master would in any way say 
what he was. What object would it serve? I know 
a great many will say that Christ proclaimed Himself — 
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," and so on. 
Yes, if he came on a special mission he might do so, but 
the general rule is that neither disciples nor Masters 
would say what they are. H. P. B. would never have 
said she was a disciple if she had not been told to do so. 
Generally nothing is said, but occasionally it is, when a 
new movement like ours is given to the world. Some 
people have to say, "We know. We are not talking by 
hearsay. We know." Otherwise, the fact of master- 
hood or discipleship is concealed. It is far better that 
it should be, because the statement of it more often raises 
trouble and criticism than anything else. 

Question — Do these Masters spend as much time in 
the physical bodies as ordinary people, working through 
the physical body? 

Answer— The consciousness of a Master is on the 
atmic plane. His consciousness may use many forms 
for the work he does. Most of their work is on the 
mental and spiritual planes — working by thought cur- 
rents on the world, watching the affairs of nations, and 
the policies of nations, guiding to some extent, throw- 
ing ideas into the minds of kings and statesmen, and 
much that we cannot understand makes their great 
wo rid- work. 

Question- — Are they able to pass from one body to 
another at will? 

Answer — Yes, but they do not need to pass from one 



116 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



body as a rule. Suppose a Master wishes to appear at 
any distant place, he would not take the trouble to 
carry his astral and mental bodies and all that way over ; 
he would create a body for himself at the point where 
he wanted to appear- — make it just at the place he wished 
it to be. 

Question — A physical body? 

Answer — Physical, if he wished; more often astral. 

Question — I would understand from that, if he would 
create for the time being, say, a physical body, he would 
have two physical bodies, one in Tibet where he left it 
asleep, and create a physical body in another part of 
the world. 

Answer — Quite right. 

Question — He might create a number? 

Answer — He might create a dozen such bodies or 
more. That is why they are called illusory bodies. They 
are bodies of appearance. 

Question — What degree of cohesion would there be in 
such a body? 

Answer — As much as he might need for the purposes 
he had. Suppose a man wanted to appear so that he 
might be seen only, in touching such a body the hand 
would go through ; but if he wanted to make it so that 
he might affect by his touch another physical body, he 
would density to the point where it would be tangible. 
It is a mere matter of degree. 

Question — Would it be possible that a Master would 
take up a body that had been already prepared ? 

Answer — I think that would be very unlikely. Of 
course, they often speak through another body. Madame 
Blavatsky, for instance, often gave her body as a vehicle 



ANSWERS 



11? 



so that a Master might speak through it ; she stepped out 
and he stepped in. If you read Old Diary Leaves you 
will find a number of such cases. 

Question — The person to whom the physical body be- 
longed stepped out and the other stepped in and took 
possession of the body for the time? 

Answer — Yes, that happened fairly often. 

Question — What is the difference between that and 
the ordinary uses of ordinary mediumship? 

Answer — The mechanism is exactly the same. The 
difference would be that the ordinary medium is not 
conscious of the proceeding. He is thrown into a trance, 
and leaves his body empty for anybody to come in. He 
is like a house that any tramp outside can walk into and 
take possession of, while in this case the disciple, in 
order to be of use to his Master, consciously lends the 
body to him for the moment ; the mechanism is just the 
same. You know in the old days — I mean long ago, 
in the days of Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Rome, it was 
a regularly recognized way of learning. The virgins 
who were kept in the temples, the sybils, were used, in 
order that some great teacher who was not present in 
the physical body might speak through them. The 
vestal virgins in the old temples were used in that way. 
and were carefully guarded for the purpose. Take your 
ordinary medium, living in the world under all sorts of 
conditions, eating flesh, drinking wine, allowing people 
to come around who are wine-drinkers and meat-eaters, 
the whole conditions are unfavorable, and no very high 
intelligence can use such a medium. The fact of me- 
diumship as one of the ways of communication between 
the two worlds has always been known ; but in the old 



118 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



times the medium was guarded with scrupulous care 
from everything that could pollute or mar. Now, of 
course, that is not done. Anybody on the other side 
who happens to come along steps in. Nothing can be 
more unwise or dangerous than that; it is bad for the 
medium and not good for the people on the other side. 

Question — Can't that be controlled by the medium? 

Answer — If the medium is thoroughly well trained 
and psychically conscious, yes ; but how many of them 
are so? The word used, "control," implies that the con- 
trol is outside and not inside. 

Question — Can't they recognize the spirit that comes 
to them and test it? 

Answer — If they have that power, then they are in a 
far safer condition than the ordinary medium, of course. 

Question — What is Co-Masonry? How different from 
Masonry ? 

Answer— All I can say here is, that in Co-Masonry 
men and women are treated entirely on a level, and no 
difference is made between them ; while in ordinary 
Masonry only men are admitted. Otherwise they are 
exactly the same. 

Question — In your lecture on Yoga to the members 
in London you are reported to have said that H. P. B. 
was a reincarnation of St. Germain. Is that correct? 

Answer — That is quite incorrect. They are quite in- 
dependent beings, but are great friends and fellow- 
workers. But I am afraid I cannot promise to contra- 
diet all the things I am made to say by reporters. 

Question — Is astrology in harmony with theosophy? 
Is it to be relied on, and do you advise students to study 



ANSWERS 



119 



it, or rather are there any good reasons why students 
should not study astrology? 

Answer — There is a science of astrology. Of that 
there is no doubt. Modern astrology has lost a very 
large part of the old science., and so it is not as thor- 
oughly reliable as one would wish it to be. But a great 
deal may be learned from it. A horoscope drawn by a 
well trained astrologer will generally be very useful on 
the question of character. Not so reliable in the fore- 
telling of events. Useful as giving favorable and unfa- 
vorable conditions, but not so as to how a person would 
act under them. All the best astrologers I know always 
point out that according to the stage of evolution of the 
native will be the accuracy or inaccuracy of the horo- 
scope which is drawn. If he is advanced, the horoscope 
only shows the general trend of his life. How far he 
will modify it, change, control it, will depend on him- 
self. So I regard it as a very useful study in many 
cases, but not one that ought to be blindly relied on, 
and I think that is what the most thoughtful astrologers 
would say. 

Question — Would you say that astrology was one of 
the approximate sciences ? 

Answer — I do not think that astrology can be said to 
be complete as it is studied now. The influence of the 
planets, yes, that is a real thing, but the initiative of man 
has also to be considered. You can lay down condi- 
tions, you can give general averages as to how people 
will act under those conditions. You can say how per- 
sons of certain characteristics will act. But individuals 
may always modify things very much. 

Question — Will you please tell us something of the 



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correspondences between the three life waves and the 
three gunas? 

Answer — This is worked out fairly carefully in A 
Study in Consciousness; it would be better to study it 
carefully there than to take my necessarily brief answer. 
Each one of the life-waves embodies pre-eminently one 
aspect of consciousness. The first life-wave embodies 
the aspect of activity. The second life-wave the aspect 
of cognition — knowledge. The last life-wave the aspect 
of power, or will. That is the first thing to get hold of. 
Then with the first life-wave, that of activity, will be 
correlated the quality, or guna, in matter, of rajas, mo- 
bility. You can see how the two go together ; activity 
in consciousness ; mobility, the power to respond to 
motion, in matter. Then the second, cognition, corre- 
sponds to sattna, rhythm, or harmony, sometimes called 
the cognizability of matter. The reason for that is that 
every change in consciousness is correlated with a par- 
ticular vibration in matter and sattna, harmony or 
rhythm, is the principle of vibration. Hence, cognition 
in consciousness, cognizability in matter ; or sattna, an- 
swering to wisdom. The third life-wave, power, is cor- 
related to inertia in matter, resistance. Those are the 
three relations. Power embodies itself in the resistance 
of matter ; wisdom in the rhythm of matter ; activity in 
the mobility of matter. You will find it, as I say, 
worked out much more fully in A Study in Conscious- 
ness. 

Question— Is there a Co- Masonic Lodge started in or 
planned for America? Is it advisable for Theosophists 
to endeavor to join it? Is there any indication that such 



ANSWERS 



121 



a movement will be used for the spread of spiritual 
influences? 

Answer — My great interest in it is that it may be 
used for the spread of mystical ideas. Masonry has an 
ancient symbolism which is little understood, but which 
contains within it the whole of the theosophical teach- 
ings. It is possible to teach Theosophy through Masonic 
symbolism in a way to which a great many people will 
listen who will not listen to Theosophy pure and simple. 
For instance, in a Masonic Lodge on the Continent of 
Europe I can teach Theosophy through Masonry to 
those who will not listen to Theosophy as such, but 
hearing the familiar symbols of Masonry will listen, and 
it makes a new avenue for spreading Theosophic ideas. 
Madame Blavatsky wanted that to be done. She was 
not able to carry that out herself. There is a center in 
America, in New York. The name and address of the 
head of the movement over here can be obtained by 
asking my friend, Mrs. Sharpe. 

Question — For our information, please state a case of 
wrong-doing on the part of a Theosophical Society 
member that would clearly justify the expulsion of the 
member. 

Answer — I cannot, because I am not in favor of 
expulsion. I will tell you what I think is the most justi- 
fiable case for expulsion, where a T. S. member uses his 
membership for the swindling of another T. S. member 
in money matters. That is a case that I think most 
deserves expulsion. But I would not expel, I would 
publish it, to save people from being cheated. I think 
the exposure is sufficient protection, and I have no object 
in injuring a person more than is absolutely necessary 



122 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



for the protection of other persons. I would not expel 
the swindler, but I would publish the fact that he was a 
swindler in every theosophical journal, to prevent peo- 
ple from being swindled. No, I have never been in 
favor of expulsion. In the trouble that arose round a . 
great Theosophist, Mr. Judge, many years ago, when a 
motion was brought forward in India for his expulsion, 
I opposed it. I objected to what he had done. But I 
opposed his expulsion on the same ground that I take 
now, that I would not expel a brother, even if he makes 
a mistake, especially one who had rendered to the move- 
ment such great services as Mr. Judge had done. 

Question — Take a supposed case of wrong-doing 
where it would not be wise to expel ; or is it unwise ever 
to expel a member of the T. S.? 

Answer — I think it is better never to expel. I may 
say frankly I do not feel I am to be regarded as a crim- 
inal because I treat a criminal kindly. 

Question— How far does Theosophy agree with Dar- 
winism? 

Answer— Of course, occult science teaches the prin- 
ciple of evolution. It could not identify itself with any 
particular form of it as taught by science, because while 
much is true, much is mistaken. The fundamental occult 
idea of evolution is that spirit, enfolding itself in matter, 
shapes matter to its own purposes. So far as any scien- 
tific theory regards life as primary and matter as second- 
ary, so far it would be in accord with occult teaching. 
Where it makes matter primary and thought or spirit 
the secondary, it is in opposition to it. 

Question — Where will the life from earth go when 
it finishes here? 



ANSWERS 



123 



Answer — To the next globe; we call it Globe E, the 
earth being Globe D. There is no doubt there is a globe 
to which we pass on, as there was one from which we 
came. The next globe that we can speak of with knowl- 
edge is very transparent, I am inclined to think made of 
ether, and invisible to physical science, because when 
you are on it you can see right through deep into it, just 
as you can through water. 

Question — Is the Manu of the Fifth Root Race a 
Venus Adept, or does he belong to the earth evolution? 

Answer — He is one that came over from Venus, and 
he does not belong to our evolution. 

Question— Are there not two Manus for the next 
Race? 

Answer — In a round, yes, the root and the seed ; but 
not in a race. 

Question — Are there not two Manus of the next Race 
instead of one? 

Answer — No. The Manu is, so to speak, the father 
of the Race, the king, the ruler of it. 

Question — But we thought he was also the king and 
teacher. 

Answer— Then he was not the Manu. Manu is the 
name of the king. Bodhisattva is the name of the 
teacher. There is only one Manu, the king, and one 
Bodhisattva, the teacher. 

Question— How can you best go into the astral con- 
sciously ? 

Answer — It is in the first place a matter of faculty, 
the faculty with which you are born ; and then a mat- 
ter of practice, by deep concentration of mind, until the 
mind is able to work without using the brain at all. 



124 



THEOSOPHXCAL LECTURES 



When the mind is able to work without the brain, then 
it is very easy to slip out of the body with full conscious- 
ness. Everybody goes out every night in sleep, only not 
consciously. 

Question — Could any one go to sleep without the 
astral body removing itself from the physical? 
Answer — No. 

Question — Will you tell us something concerning the 
city of Shamballah, referred to in The Pedigree of Man? 

Answer— It was an ancient city, built in Lemurian 
times, with the architecture that you find reproduced in 
the great monuments of Egypt, such as the Temple of 
Karnak. There is not very much to say about it. It is 
a sacred city. 

Question— Do you not say in The Pedigree of Man, 
that there is a race of Adepts living in Shamballah? 

Answer — That is so. I don't remember whether I 
said so in The Pedigree of Man. 

Question — We have heard you were going to revise 
The Pedigree of Man, and issue a new edition. If this 
is so, when may we expect the new edition to appear? 

Answer — I am reprinting it now. I am adding to it, 
as I thought it would help you a good deal, the notes 
written by Mr. Schwarz, so the next edition will have 
that additional matter. It is very difficult to say when 
it will appear. It is going through the press at the 
present moment. When I get back home I shall hurry it. 

The meeting closed. 

September 18, 1907, 3 p. m. 
Questions — Do astral entities partake of food? State- 
ments about offerings to the Devas would almost make 



ANSWERS 



125 



me think that they require food. Yet it is said that on 
the astral plane we are not subject to the same require- 
ments as here. 

Answer — The inhabitants of the astral plane do take 
in food, but not in the way in which we take it. That is, 
they do not eat. The astral body as a whole absorbs 
the requisite nutriment. It is not like breathing, because 
we breathe through an organ, but all over the body the 
astral entity may draw in the sustenance that is required. 

Question — I understand that astral entities are some- 
times seen dressed as ordinary persons ordinarily dress 
on the physical plane, sometimes enveloped in a white 
robe, etc. Are these robes of their own creating or the 
creation of the observer? Under any circumstances I 
suppose such creation is an unconscious process, much 
the same as the circulation of the blood, breathing, etc. 

Answer — The astral entity is dressed according to his 
own idea of himself. As he thinks of himself, so does 
he appear. If he does not think of anything in par- 
ticular, then he appears on the astral plane clothed in 
the garments that at the time he is wearing on the phy- 
sical. When a person goes to sleep, leaving the physical 
body, which is clothed in the ordinary nightdress, he 
may become conscious of his attire on the astral plane. 
The nightdress would seem an inappropriate dress and 
would be substituted by the ordinary clothing of the 
day by the mere action of thought. The person appears 
as he thinks of himself. I know an Englishman who is 
very particular about having on the appropriate dress, 
and that idea in his own mind makes him appear in the 
astral plane in what are the ordinary dress clothes, and 
you have no idea how funny he looks. But they are 



126 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUEES 



quite satisfactory to him, because they are the proper 
clothes, as he thinks, for an English gentleman to wear. 
A lady who found herself on the astral plane thought the 
ordinary dress was not appropriate, and she thought of 
the Greek flowing robes. And she immediately appeared 
in that garb. So you need not be anxious on the ques- 
tion of astral clothes. You can always have exactly what 
you want. 

Question— After "passing over" it is said that very 
often one does not know that he is dead. But as objects 
appear to be seen from all sides at once or in the fourth 
dimension, should not this fact quickly convince the indi- 
vidual that he is no longer upon the physical plane? 

Answer — Large numbers of those that pass over have 
not the astral senses developed at all, the astral shakrams. 
All that is available then are the senses of the physical 
side. These, of course, are in astral matter and so re- 
spond to astral vibrations so that what those people see 
is not at all what a man sees who is really astrally clair- 
voyant. They do not see through things and see them 
in the fourth dimension, and so on. They only see the 
astral counterparts of physical objects. Suppose such a 
person, a quite undeveloped man, passed out of the phy- 
sical body yesterday and came floating in here. He 
would see the astral counterpart of everything here. He 
would see yourselves, the room, the chairs, the tables, 
and so on, and to him it would seem all right, just the 
same as he would have seen it the day before in the 
physical body. Some of you may not be Theosophists 
and may not clearly understand the difference between 
astral vision in the full sense of the term and the sense 
of sight in the astral body. Now your eyes and ears, 



ANSWERS 



127 



the organ of taste, and so on, have each their own cen- 
ters in the astral body, and it is only when the stimulus 
affects that astral center that you see, hear, taste, and so 
on. But the astral senses have not the same centers. 
Those are centers for the physical senses, and the astral 
senses are entirely different. I used the word shakram 
just now. It means a wheel. In the astral body there 
are centers which are a little like the fireworks wheel, 
known as Catherine's, the things that whirl around and 
go off with a puff. It is only when the visual shakram 
is developed that the man sees as we call it, astrally. 
This is a very different thing from the vision which 
a man uses after death who has never developed his 
astral body to the point of organizing the astral senses 
which are dependent on the astral shakrams. The latter 
does not see what the clairvoyant sees on the astral plane, 
but only the counterparts of physical objects. As a rule 
a man who does not know he has passed away feels more 
or less uncomfortable and doubtful. It is quite true that 
he does not know that he is dead, but he feels that there 
is something wrong with him. I will tell you a thing 
that took place in London. An old gentleman who died 
came floating into a room where several Theosophists 
were present, two of whom were clairvoyant and saw 
him. They spoke to him. He at once said, "I am so 
glad to meet somebody that can speak ; I have been talk- 
ing to people for a week or two and nobody takes any 
notice of me. It is annoying to speak to people and be 
ignored." He had been an ordinary Christian person. 
He said, "I cannot be in Hell, because it is not bad 
enough for that ; and if it is Heaven I don't think much 
of it." He had been an old sailor and was rather abrupt 



128 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



in speech. Now one advantage of getting people to read 
theosophieal books is that it gives people an idea of what 
there is on the other side, and that helps them to under- 
stand and recognize their situation. Then they begin to 
say, What is the condition I am in, and they quickly 
learn they have passed out of the body. They are apt 
to have a rather unpleasant time of it if they are entirely 
ignorant when they go out. 

Question — It is stated that the astral body is egg- 
shaped and again that it has the same form as the phy- 
sical body. Kindly explain. 

Answer — The astral body is egg-shaped, as all of you 
know who are using your physical bodies ; but when you 
go out of the physical body in sleep the astral body takes 
the shape of the physical. It appears as you think of 
yourself. But when you are w r orLlng through it in the 
physical body, it is simply an egg-shaped body surround- 
ing the physical body. There is only an apparent contra- 
diction between the two statements. 

Question — What connection exists between an ampu- 
tated limb and the body that it was formerly a part of, 
seeing that burning the limb sometimes causes a feeling 
of pain? 

Answer — What is left after amputation is the etheric 
double. That is unaffected and that remains joined to 
the rest of the physical body. Consequently if that is in 
any way affected by heat, by cold, by electric action, 
even by a pin or anything pointed touching it, pain may 
be felt where there is apparently no limb. You may have 
a pain in your great toe after it has been cut off. That 
is, the etheric counterpart may suffer, may be injured, and 
it will feel exactly as the gross part felt when it was 



ANSWERS 



129 



attached to the body. For a certain time a link remains 
between the amputated limb and its etheric counterpart, 
a sort of magnetic rapport between the two. It does 
not last very long, but while it does last it is possible 
that the etheric double may feel anything done to the 
physical part which has been cut off; but only a very 
short time, and only from particular kinds of injuries. 
In the ordinary case of cremation the separation would 
have taken place completely before the burning, if the 
burning does not occur within twenty-four hours of the 
death of the gross body. It is necessary to take some 
means whereby the magnetic link shall be broken before 
the gross body is burned. In India, for instance, they 
burn the body very quickly, within a very few hours 
ordinarily after death. Then certain methods are used 
to make a complete break between the two so that no 
possible suffering occurs. 

Question— What is the form of the astral body after 
death ? 

Answer— The same as the appearance of the man be- 
fore death. It is possible, although a little troublesome, 
to find a person cn the astral plane that you do not 
know, if you can get from a photograph, a sufficient 
likeness to be able to recognize him. 

Question — What is the truth concerning table-tipping, 
so-called spirit-rapping, etc.? The entities (if they are 
entities) usually seem frivolous and possessed cf much 
less intellect than the average human Lein^. Why is 
this so? 

Answer — If a person is present at a seance who wants 
to see a friend who has passed cn, the wish may bring 
the friend. But the ordinary manifestations are pro- 



130 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



duced by entities of the lowest type, the easiest to reach, 
the nearest to the physical plane, and they are just as 
frivolous, unintelligent and foolish as a lot of slum peo- 
ple whom you might meet here. You do not expect 
if you go down to the slums, as a rule, to meet people 
of very high intelligence. It always puzzles me to know 
why intelligent people want to hold conversation with 
the slum population of the astral plane, because they are 
not a bit improved by it. They are exactly the same 
afterward as they were before. A friend of mine wanted 
me sometime ago to attend one, and I went. There were 
a number of entities of an exceedingly low type, of low 
intelligence. One thing they did was to take out a 
brandy bottle from a cupboard and pour it down the 
mouth of a sitter. They took some sugar and crammed 
it down the throats of some others. They did not try 
this with me. They asked if they might give me some 
sugar. I said yes if they put it in my hand but not to 
touch my face. Ordinary mediums allow themselves 
to be taken possession of by any passing entity. This 
Is the same as if you opened your door and allowed any- 
body to come into your house from the streets. You 
>vould not in that way get a very desirable company. Of 
course, if a trained medium, of careful living, who did 
not take meat and alcohol and lead a pure life, chose her 
niters carefully she would get a better class of communi- 
cations. But everybody that is acquainted with spiritual- 
ism knows that it is often necessary to stop the seance 
of the undesirable people that come. If they start to 
throw the table about and slap the sitters, the only thing 
to do is to stop, simply saying you don't care to be in 
such company. They cannot force themselves on you, 



ANSWERS 



131 



unless you give them the opportunity. W hen you have 
been there several times you may get an undesirable vis- 
itor who goes home with you and that is very trouble- 
some. It is these things that make people who under- 
stand conditions in the other world wish not to go to 
spiritualistic seances. For the ordinary person it is not 
a good method of investigation, unless he can defend 
himself. There is no reason why because people have 
passed through death they should be regarded with more 
reverence than before, because they are exactly the same. 
They only drop their physical body, and there is no 
more reason why you should treat them with reverence 
than you should treat anybody else with reverence. You 
should be polite to everybody, but you should not look- 
up to a person because he may have dropped his physical 
body. He may be as silly there as he was here. 

Question — Would not the motive with which you at- 
tend the seance be of consequence? 

Answer — To a limited extent. I guarded myself by 
saying, if you chose the medium and chose the sitters. 
I talked of the ordinary-paid medium whose seances 
anyone may visit. It is not wise to go unless you know 
enough to protect yourself. I know many cases of trouble 
coming from that sort of thing. 

Question — What, if any, spiritual significance has the 
Beha Movement (or that of the Arabian Prophet) in 
the world ? 

Answer — It is a movement of profound interest. He 
is the son of the original prophet who is called Beha, 
the "Gatew r ay." Very great courage and devotion marked 
his life and that of his immediate followers, and the 
courage they showed and the trials through which they 



i 



132 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUKES 



passed are worthy of admiration. I do not know any- 
thing about him personally, but I have talked with per- 
sons who have come in touch with him, and he seems 
to be very highly advanced spiritually, and a man worthy 
of all respect. 

Question- — At the wedding of Cana, when Jesus was 
told by His mother that there was no wine, He said, "My 
time has not yet come." What did He mean ? 

Answer — I don't know whether that was an historical 
event or an allegorical event. Whichever it was, the 
answer put into the mouth of Jesus, "My time has not 
yet come," is significant from the occult standpoint. 
There is a certain time which is the appropriate time for 
a thing to happen, and a great occultist will neither act 
before nor after it. He will wait for the proper time, 
and I presume that is the meaning that ought to be 
attached to this statement. There was a certain condi- 
tion, a certain period which was the proper time for his 
action, and until that came he declined to take any action 
at all. A stranger case w^ould be that of Judas Iscariot 
You may remember he is spoken of as one of the twelve. 
For three years Jesus knew perfectly well that the man 
was an enemy and betrayer. And yet He permitted him 
to remain among His twelve apostles, to go with Him 
everywhere and to have all the weight and authority 
which naturally came from association with Himself. 
That is a very, very instructive thing. For Jesus knew 
the character of Judas, but, though knowing it, He was 
obliged to wait until the karmic hour came when the 
man would betray Him. He had no right to guard Him- 
self against Judas. That is often the case with the oc- 
cultist. He has no right to act in order to guard against 



ANSWEES 



133 



a danger which he does not know about on the physical 
plane. Very often people said of Madam Blavatsky that 
it was a strange thing that, with all her occult faculties, 
she was so often deceived. She was not deceived at all, 
but had to put up with a man that was trying to injure 
her, because the hour had not yet come. He had his 
proper time, and until the hour struck for the action of 
which he was the agent she had no right to protect her- 
self. Although many people would say, with regard to 
Madam Blavatsky, "That is only an excuse," it is just as 
well to remember that she followed so great an example 
as that of Jesus Himself, who allowed one of His inti- 
mate associates for three years to be with Him and ulti- 
mately to betray Him. 

Question — Can occult investigation be aided by psy- 
chometry? Is it probable that the independent investi- 
gations of two or more psychometers of equal ability 
would yield essentially the same results? 

Answer — Psychometry is one of the simpler forms of 
occult investigation, one of the means used. I do not 
think it is sure that the independent observations of 
two psychometers will always yield the same results, 
and I will tell you why. I will take a marked case. This 
ring I wear was given to a psychometer. The psv- 
chometer might see Madame Blavatsky's master and 
say something about him. Another psychometer might 
get on the next string, as it were, and get something 
from another master, while a third might touch a third 
level and see me. In that way all three might be trust- 
worthy, and yet quite different. So you must make 
some allowance for the psychometer. One person would 
be more en rapport with myself, another more easily en 



134 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



rapport with Madame Blavatsky. It is only by a fairly 
all around knowledge that you are able to estimate at 
its true value what you may get through many people 
who practice one or another of the occult arts. Such a 
person is often condemned far too hastily. A perfect 
psychometer, taking time enough, would see all in out- 
line, and that would take a long time. As a rule only 
a moment is taken up with the touch. I saw a psy- 
chometer in London who was examining numerous ob- 
jects. I gave him an object that belonged to Madame 
Blavatsky which had been through several hands. A 
very confused reading was given. But while it sounded 
inaccurate, I know 7 it was accurate because I could see 
the touch of the people who had had the object in their 
hands. 

Question — It has been said that some of the minor ills 
•of the body, such as often recurring neuralgia of the 
head, is a habit caused not by a diseased condition of the 
body but by a sort of obsession. Is this so? If so, how 
far are we justified in using mental efforts in such a 
condition ? 

Answer— It would be perfectly possible that an out- 
side influence might cause pain of that sort, or any pain 
in fact. If such a thing is caused from the outside, there 
is not the slightest possible objection to driving it away. 
If the pain arises from disease of the person himself, 
then whether it is wise or not to cure it by a mental 
effort depends very largely on the knowledge of the 
person. There are some forms of illness which are 
generated in the mental or astral bodies. It is possible 
to throw such a disease back into the astral body by 
mental means, and then harm is done rather than good. 



ANSWERS 



135 



It is also possible to drive it out. Hence it is very desir- 
able that the person using mental force in these things 
should, if possible, be clairvoyant and know exactly what 
he is doing. He ought also to be trained in anatomy 
and physiology, in order to use that power safely. The 
safest method of all is by not applying the thought to 
the body itself nor to the pain but to the realization of 
the self in the patient; and so by trying to increase the 
realization of the self, which is always perfect health, 
cause an inward action from the self outward, and that 
can never do any possible harm. But where the mind 
runs on the body it is very likely to cause mischief. It 
is not always well to get rid of every little pain in the 
body which you may have. There is a tendency to desire 
too much bodily luxury throughout the whole of this 
civilization, and people are apt to grow far too sensitive 
to minor discomforts and minor pains, and go to mental 
force to save themselves temporary inconvenience. It is 
far better to ignore it and go quietly on, and be not quite 
so much at the mercy of your bodies as some of you may 
be. A certain hardening and disciplining of the body 
may be acquired, making it a much more valuable instru- 
ment than otherwise it would be. The moment you be- 
come what we call occultists you have no right to use 
any power you possess for your own cure. You may use 
it for your neighbor but not yourself. It was said of a 
great teacher, "He saved others ; himself He cannot 
save." That is the case with the occultist. 

Question — Is the use of medicine advisable under any 
circumstances ? 

Answer — Yes ; I dare say it is in some. I think the 
fewer drugs and the less of them the better. I believe 



136 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



the great curative agencies of careful diet, plenty of 
fresh air, sufficient sleep, proper exercise, and such things 
are much better ways of making the body healthy than 
drugs. I think occasionally where there has been a 
sudden injury a drug may be useful to tide over the mo- 
ment of danger, but I believe the habit of taking drugs 
is exceedingly deleterious. 

Question — Since the body is the instrument the soul 
uses on this plane, would it not be desirable to bring it 
to as high a state of perfection as possible? 

Answer— Certainly ; the better body you have, the bet- 
ter work it will do on the physical plane, but sometimes 
there is too much time and thought spent on the body, be- 
cause thought can work on higher planes and more can 
be done by using thought outside of the body than by 
concentrating it on small physical ailments. 

Question — In curing a diseased condition, what is the 
effect of Karma? 

Answer — You need not be troubled about Karma any 
more than by the law of gravitation. You cannot inter- 
fere with it. That is a point that all who are beginning 
to read theosophical books ought to realize very clearly. 
Sometimes you find an ill-trained Theosophist who says. 
"I must not help so and so; it is his Karma to suffer." 
You might as well say you will not pick up a child thai 
has fallen, because by the law of gravitation it has fallen 
and must be left under its law to take care of itself. 
Your duty is to do all you can to help others. If you can- 
not help them, their Karma will take you out of their 
road. Do not take Karma as an excuse for indolence, as 
I am sorry to say many people do. One reason why I 
lay great stress on this is because the other view has 



ANSWERS 



137 



done so much harm in India. The East Indian has 
changed the old doctrine of Karma, which is consistent 
with the most vigorous action, into a kind of doctrine of 
faith, some great force that he cannot resist. Now, 
Karma is only made up of three things, thought, desire 
and action, of the past. If the whole of the past is 
against you at any point you cannot overcome it. But 
with most of you Karma is made up of two great streams 
playing against one another, of the good thoughts, de- 
sires and actions; and the bad thoughts, desires and ac- 
tions. Look over one day and see how mixed you are. 
You have not thought, desired, acted perfectly the whole 
day, nor have you thought, desired or acted badly the 
whole day. You have created a mixed Karma in your 
past lives. Now in many cases Karma is fairly evenly 
balanced and the effort of the moment may turn it 
one way or the other. You add one thought and it may 
turn the scale. All the good thoughts are there balanced 
by the bad ones. One more good one and the balance 
goes down. Suppose you have a balance with a ton on 
one side; you would not be able to lift it. But suppose 
there is a ton in each balance ; then an ounce would make 
it go down on one side or the other. That is often the 
case with Karma. If you realized that you would never 
step exertion. Supposing Karma is against you, sup- 
pose it is too strong for you, you weaken it by your 
exertion, and the next time you will be able to conquer. 
Suppose a man brings over a Karma of drunkenness, he 
cannot help getting drunk. But if he fights against it on 
every occasion, holds out to the last moment of strength 
and then fails, it does not matter so much. That failure 
is one step towards success, and when he has done that a 



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dozen times he will conquer, because each effort has di- 
minished by so much of the weight which crushes him, 
and the time will come when he will be free. 

Question— Up to what point between two incarnations 
is the feeling or sense of identity maintained? 

Answer — The feeling of identity is maintained up to 
the end of heavenly life. All through the astral plane 
and all through the heavenly until everything has been 
worked out of the last earthly incarnation, when the 
mental body breaks up, then the sense of identity with 
that last form falls away as far as the lower planes are 
concerned. It is taken up then by the ego himself. He 
always knows he was John Smith or Richard Jones, but 
John Smith won't remember Richard Jones. The ego 
will remember both. The John Smith will come to the 
end of his experience as such after the end of his heav- 
enly life. That varies among ordinary people anywhere 
from a hundred years up to a couple of thousand, a long 
period, as a rule. It is only when it is all worked out 
into the ego that that sense drops away from the lower 
body and the lower body scatters. The memory of the 
ego is always complete. Under that law the memory 
of the Buddha was so complete that he remembered 
back to the time when he was in the form of a tiger and 
the form of a tree. That was a high stage of memory, 
carrying the link along like that. A normal person gets 
flashes of memory of former incarnations after a cer- 
tain amount of training. 

Question — How far does the etheric double extend 
beyond the physical body? 

Answer — Just a little; on the average six, eight or 



ANSWERS 



139 



ten inches, all around the body. The astral body is very 
much larger, of course. 

Question — If retrogression in mentality or spirituality 
is possible in future incarnations, is a man's evident in- 
tellectual and spiritual condition in his present incarna- 
tion an index to the degree to which he has evolved? 

Answer — Xo ; it is not. You cannot retrogress really. 
That is impossible. You can have a body through which 
the whole of you cannot express itself, through which 
very little of you can express itself. Suppose the ca^e 
of a man who had a very bad piece of Karma to work 
out, the Karma we will say of a very low stage of evolu- 
tion, when he was a barbarian. For some reason or 
other that Karma has remained unexhausted ; sometimes 
perhaps because the people with whom he was associated 
in the Karma were not born into the world when he 
was. This Karma has to be exhausted before he can 
pass on to liberation. A body may have to be taken in 
which that particular piece of Karma is to be worked 
out. That body may by no means express the ego. Yet 
the man lives in that and exhausts his Karma, and, hav- 
ing done that, his next body will be more suitable to his 
stage of development. You cannot, when you have un- 
folded, fold up again any more than the bud. That is 
against the law of nature. 

Question — How did the belief arise in Egypt that 
human souls could reincarnate in animal bodies? 

Answer — That was not peculiar to Egypt. It was 
the belief all over the ancient world. Greek philosophers 
taught it. Plato taught it. Many of us taught it. The 
Indians taught it. It arose because it represented a fact, 
but there is a great deal of misunderstanding about it, 



140 



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and that is why we say the reincarnation of a human be- 
ing in an animal does not take place. I won't say it with 
my personal knowledge. I should guard myself a little, 
and yet in a sense it is true. You cannot reincarnate in 
an animal, but you can be tied to an animal body for a 
time. The condition is not found frequently, but still 
there are such cases. Suppose during an earth life a 
man has given way to all forms of animal temptation to 
a very excessive degree. Such a man may have devel- 
oped qualities in himself which cannot express them- 
selves in the human body. Of this there are several 
stages. You know sometimes what is called a monster is 
born of a human. There was a man in London a few 
years ago called the elephant man. That man's face was 
shaped like the elephant's face and trunk. He was never 
allowed to go out at all. He was kept in a hospital until 
he died, between twenty-five and thirty years of age. In 
a case like that the life of the human being has been 
that of an animal, but the form is such that it cannot at- 
tach itself to the body. It is too brutal. You cannot 
make a man an animal. You cannot go back like that. 
But such an animal man can be attached to an animal 
body. The consciousness remains human. The man can- 
not express himself. It is like a sentence of solitary con- 
finement. He is tied to that animal form until he has 
exhausted the brutal force which he developed and then 
he is set free. In such a case the individual is no more 
an animal than a horse is a post because he is tied to it. 
The man is tied to the animal form, but he has within 
him the human soul. The human soul is present in the 
animal body, and the human and the animal are co- 
tenants. Fortunately now it is rare; it used to be fre- 



A.NSWEBS 



141 



quent. There is another case to be considered, that of 
one inflicting frightful cruelties upon lower animals, 
which I hope are net inflicted in this country, but in 
some European countries, as in Italy, France and Ger- 
many. For instance, where a dog has been put into an 
oven and baked to see how long he would live, a creature 
tortured to see how much pain it will bear before life 
gives out. I do not want to make you ill by telling you 
the accounts of their experiments, written by these men. 
I would not take them as true from anybody but them- 
selves. I did not think it credible that human beings 
could do such things until I read their writings myself. 
Such people on the other side are attached to animal body 
by the astral in order to learn compassion by suffering. 
That is the explanation of the frightful cruelties inflicted 
sometimes. It is not the animal ; it is some human be- 
ing who has inflicted these tortures, the inquisitors of the 
past who racked. and tortured human beings. 

Question — Many vivisectionists think they are labor- 
ing in a good cause trying to find out new facts for the 
benefit of the race ? 

Answer- — These people will have to learn that in a uni- 
verse in which the very law of life is love, torture is not 
a legitimate way to gain knowledge. They will have to 
learn this by their own suffering. I know you say the 
motive is sometimes a good one, but the method chosen 
is a perverted way of gaining knowledge. At a certain 
point the human conscience rebels. I do not think that 
there are many vivisectionists following it, but there 
might be some who would be willing to take one of their 
own children and torture that child to death in order that 
they might find out some secret nature was hiding from 



142 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



them. A man's character is changed by the way he gets 
knowledge. There are many other ways to learn besides 
following in the path of cruelty. 

Question— Is it proper to dissect an anaesthetized ani- 
mal? 

Answer— It is not right to vivisect any living thing, 
whether given an anaesthetic or otherwise, but it is not so 
wicked with an anaesthetic. 

Question — Would you consider it right to kill a dog 
to relieve its suffering? 

Answer — Personally, no. I do not think it is right to 
kail human beings to relieve suffering. Some people do; 
I do not. If a person had perfect knowledge he might 
do some things which an ordinary person ought not to 
do. By shortening life you might take away from a per- 
son the very lesson he needed to learn in that way. 

Question — Would you consider it right to prolong life, 
after a terrible accident, by using stimulants, in the hope 
of ultimate recovery? 

Answer— Some of the methods of prolonging life are 
wrong. I would not use them. 

Question — To prolong life ? 

Answer— No ; I should not use them to save my own 
life or anybody else's. Of course, those cases that are 
more on the border line are not the cases on which it is 
wise to lay stress. You want to get the conscience to 
reject the worst things first. So I lay stress on the obvi- 
ously bad things first, and get people to say they are 
bad. Then they will see other things are bad. 

Question — Are parents to blame in any sense for the 
birth of monsters? 

Answer— Certainly. That is, they have done some- 



ANSWEKS 



143 



thing in the past to cause such a sad experience for them- 
selves. No trouble comes to us that we have not caused 
ourselves. 

Question — Have clairvoyants ascertained approximate- 
ly the relative densities of atmospheric, etheric, astral 
and mental matter? 

Answer — Why, yes. They are all visible at sight, 
recognizable at sight, rather. 

Question — At what point in evolution does selfishness 
absolutely vanish? 

Answer — Well, I suppose the right answer to that 
would be, When a man feels the one self in everything 
and all other people as himself. That would probably 
not be before the stage of the "liberation" of the soul, 
the acquisition of masterhood. 

Question — -If I send out strong loving thoughts to 
my dear ones on the astral plane, is it likely those 
thoughts will reach and draw T them to me at once ? 

Answer — It is certain your thoughts will reach them. 
It is not certain that they will draw them to you at once, 
because there are many causes to prevent them coming. 
Just as would be the case if you sent a telegraphic mes- 
sage. Try to apply to these questions the same reason- 
ing you would apply on the physical plane, because you 
cannot say yes or no without any regard to circum- 
stances. The action of a person on receipt of such a 
message will depend on a thousand things. In such a 
case it is just the same on the astral plane as it would 
be here; there are all sorts of influences, claims and 
duties. I think you could often answer a question of 
that kind if you would apply the knowledge that you 
have. Too many of you have a lot of knowledge now, 



144 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



and yet you ask questions to which you do not apply that 
knowledge. It is a great thing for the Theosophist to 
apply his own knowledge. When a question, comes up 
in your own mind consider whether you can answer it 
with your own knowledge, and if you try you will very 
often find you can do so by the exercise of a little intelli- 
gence and common sense. I do not mind your asking 
me if I am here. But suppose there is no one to answer 
it; you can often answer it yourself with more satisfac- 
tion to yourself. 

Question — Is there a definite order in the essential 
qualities or faculties to be attained in the evolution of 
man? 

Answer— No ; they are very different. People born 
in the darkness will develop very different qualities from 
those born in the light, because the demands from the 
outside are so different and the faculties answer to those 
demands in so many ways that we evolve our faculties in 
a very different order. 

Question — Can adequate proof or disproof of the per- 
sistence of the individual consciousness after the death 
of the physical body be secured by evidence of a purely 
physical character? 

Answer — I think you can gain evidence convincing to 
the physical senses by a careful following out of certain 
lines of investigation. First the hypnotic method, throwing 
the person into a trance and convincing yourself that the 
intelligence is larger than the waking consciousness. That 
is a sort of preliminary step. Make yourself perfectly 
sure than the man in the trance is conscious of a num- 
ber of things which he is not conscious of when he is 
awake. Then prove to yourself that he can gain knowl- 



ANSWERS 



145 



edge in trance that he cannot gain when he is awake, 
like bringing his mind to what is happening in a distant 
town. He can see and hear what is going on there. You 
can follow that line of investigation until you have ac- 
cumulated a large number of experiments of that sort, 
showing that consciousness is larger than the waking 
sense of it. Having convinced yourself of that, that 
consciousness can work when the brain is paralyzed, 
you have made survival probable although not certain. 
If intelligence can work without the brain during life, 
it is probable that it will also be able to work when the 
brain ceases to work at what we call death. Your next 
stage would have to be along the lines of spiritualism, 
and by careful and patient investigation you might be 
able to establish the fact that there is conscious existence 
after death. Of course, there you want the help of a 
medium, and you have to take every possible precaution 
against fraud, conscious and unconscious. Very often 
the medium is not responsible for the fraud he may carry 
out. He knows nothing about it and you have to guard 
against it by preparing tests to guard against thought 
reading and thought transference. It is not easy to do, 
but it is possible, and along those two lines I think you 
can get demonstration on the physical plane of the per- 
sistence of intelligence after death. That is quite differ- 
ent from developing the faculties in yourself, which 
enable you to go out of the physical body and talk with 
the people you know in the astral world, where you can 
get convincing answers to your inquiry. 

Question — My daughter, when falling asleep, sees peo- 
ple about her not on the physical plane ; in particular her 



146 



THEOSOPHICAL 



LECTURES 



father, who died in 1899. ^ s Hkely that he is in his 

astral body? 

Answer — I think it extremely likely. It is in the 
passage from waking to sleeping that people begin to 
see. They are partly out of the physical body, not quite 
out. Many people see forms in a half-waking stage. It 
is a sign that the astral faculties are just beginning to 
open up, and certainly in the case of father and daughter 
it would be exceedingly likely that the father, who is 
always conscious of his daughter, would try to reach 
her at the time when she is most sensitive. 

Question — Take two men of exactly equal intellectual 
advancement at the zenith of their powers, one passing 
from embodied life immediately thereafter, and the other 
continuing in embodied life until having reached a state 
of the most extreme senility, which one on reaching the 
astral plane would manifest the greater advancement? 

Answer— There would be no difference on the astral 
plane in that state. If they were exactly equal they 
would respond with exactly equal power. In one case 
the body had decayed and in the other not. It would not 
make a bit of difference in the astral. But it is probable 
that the one who goes on living here will have added 
experience ; he cannot remain at the same point as the 
one who died. It is an impossible condition, because 
those extra years would have given him additional ex- 
perience. 

Question — Does embalming and preserving the body 
make any difference with the astral body? 

Answer — Not to the astral body. It does to the etheric 
double. It keeps the etheric double hanging around the 
physical form. 



ANSWERS 



Question — Then it really makes no difference to the 
individual ? 

Answer — Except that the etheric double being pre- 
served may be used for various mischievous purposes, 
and therefore it is very undesirable to preserve it by 
preserving the dense part of the body. Far better to 
let it go. 

Question — Are one's incarnations always in sub-race 
progression or do egos sometimes enter a sub-race below 
their former life? 

Answer— They go by averages. They do not follow 
any regular law of succession. 

Question — In order that a law may exist must there 
first be a law-giver? 

Answer — To me that use of the word law, which im- 
plies a law-giver, indicates a confusion of thought be- 
tween natural law and man-made law. All man-made 
law implies a law-giver, parliament, president, king, or 
whatever it may be. But what do you mean when you 
say natural law? It is an observed sequence of events 
and conditions, not that a thing must happen so-and-so, 
but that in certain conditions it will be, and in certain 
other conditions it will not be, the conditions being 
varied. That does not necessarily imply a law-giver at 
all. But if the question means whether or not in our 
universe the laws of Manu, as we observe them, are ex- 
pressions of a divine nature, I should say they are. I 
would say simply that these laws express the nature of 
God. Not that He has given them in the sense thai a 
man gives law, because a natural law is never a com- 
mand. That is an important thing to remember. If 
you get that idea worked out you will never make mis- 



148 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



takes about Karma. A person would be quite wrong if 
he said it is a natural law that water cannot boil on a 
high mountain. It is quite true that water on a high 
mountain does not boil if you have only the atmospheric 
pressure on it. The water may bubble away at 8o° or 
90° centigrade instead of a hundred because the pressure 
on it is low. But a man would be very unwise who said 
he could not make a cup of tea on that mountain. All 
he has to do is to increase the pressure by pushing down 
the lid and keeping in the steam, and when the pressure 
is equivalent to the pressure of the atmosphere at sea 
level the water would be at the right temperature to 
make tea. Water boils at ioo° under the normal pres- 
sure. This does not mean you shall not have boiling 
water at any particular place on the earth's surface. It 
is well said that Nature is conquered by obedience. You 
can do anything you like if you only know the law and 
use it. 

Question — Why do spirits at different seances disagree 
in their statements and declare that others impersonate 
them? How can we know who it is that is talking? 

Answer — We cannot. They disagree for the same rea- 
son you might disagree. Suppose a little boy comes 
along and dresses himself in your grandmother's clothes 
and says I am your grandmother. You would not be 
very much troubled. You would know he was not. So 
why be troubled when spirits say they are so and so? 
They play all sorts of tricks. You cannot know whether 
they are taking a part or not. That is the unsatisfactory 
side of spiritualistic seances. 

Question — When a child dies at a very early age, is 



ANSWEKS 



149 



it at all likely to reincarnate with the same parents again 
if there is an opportunity? 

Answer — Yes ; it very often takes place. If the love is 
strong between parent and child, that same ego will seek 
another form in the same family, and very often the 
parent will recognize it. I know one lady who was pas- 
sionately devoted to a child that died and had not the 
same feeling at all to her other children, until a child 
was born for whom all the former feeling was awakened, 
and before she heard of Theosophy she said it must be 
the same child come back. It was the same ego. Where 
the ties are strong they assert themselves in a very 
definite way. 

Question — A child dying at the age of eleven would 
hardly have time to come back? 

Answer — No ; with a child of eleven it is a different 
matter altogether. 

Question — How old can they be and come back with- 
out going through the complete cycle? 

Answer — It depends very much on the stage of ad- 
vancement. An ordinary person up to about seven years 
of age might be reborn with the same astral body with- 
out making a new mental body. But, after that, where 
the ego is woven into the body it has to pass on to the 
astral and heavenly world. Of course, a person dying at 
twelve or thirteen will come back more quickly, because 
there is so little to work out on the other side. 

Question— Has a person who feels herself very ill- 
balanced, sometimes hardly fit to live on this earth, but 
with a strong burning desire for the study of occultism, 
any moral right to take up the study? 

Answer — A person has the right to take up any study 



150 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTURES 



he is able to take up. The power of the person is the 
measure of the right. The wisdom of it is another mat- 
ter. If such a person as you describe came to me I should 
say. Leave it alone for the present ; it may do more harm 
than good; get control of yourself, and, when you do, 
you can take up the study of occultism with less danger 
to yourself. 

Question— Do you think that formally allying one's 
self with any society, even though its aims be as broad 
as those of the Theosophical Society, limits one's sphere 
of usefulness? * 

Answer — In one sense, yes ; there are some people so 
narrow T -minded that they would not listen to a man if 
they knew he was a member of the Theosophical Society, 
while if they knew he was not they might listen to what 
he said. But, on the other hand, the forces that play 
through a society of this sort add greatly to the man's 
power of doing good. The few people who would be 
kept away by their own narrowness and prejudice you 
could not help on account of their low stage of evolu- 
tion. But these would be outbalanced by the number 
you would be able to reach from the added strength that 
comes from union with the Theosophical Society. And 
then there is this to remember, that in the early days of 
the movement everyone who joins is of greater value than 
he would be two or three centuries later. People who 
join now add to the strength of the movement and 
quicken the days of its success. They bring near the 
day of wider thought and greater wisdom for mankind. 

Question — Could a little child born October 21, 1906, 
be the reincarnation of a little child passing out at the 
age of 3 years, 5 months, 17 days, a "year and a half 



ANSWERS 



151 



previous to the birth of the child born October 21, 1906? 

Answer — Yes ; it might be very possible. 

Question — These children, both being born to the same 
family and both in the month of October, would it be 
probable that we have here an immediate reincarnation? 
What proof of it would there be besides that which we 
would get from observation? 

Answer — The only proof would be the similarity be- 
tween the parent and child in both cases. Of course, 
the proof is not complete. The character of the child 
might show and the feelings of the parents might show. 

Question — Is it possible for a three-year-old child to 
have any definite Karma ? 

Answer — No. 

Question— I have been told by Theosophists that sud- 
denly formed and unusually close friendships show that 
those naturally attracted to each other have known and 
loved one another in other lives. Is this so ? 

Answer — Yes; this is always a sign that they have 
known each other before. 

Question — Is spontaneous generation a fact? 

Answer — On that I have no more knowledge than any 
ordinary scientist. Theoretically, it must be a fact from 
the theosophical standpoint, because everything lives. 
There is no such thing as dead matter to us. A grain of 
oats has in it the germ of life. We should not use the 
words "spontaneous generation, ,, because they imply a 
special act, as it were. We should say every atom is a 
living thing and joins in other forms, according to its 
affinities and the compulsions exercised over it, its attrac- 
tions and so on. I do not think the words "spontaneous 
generation ,, would be used by Theosophists for that rea- 



152 



THEOSOPHICAL LECTUKES 



son, because it means a coming of living matter from 
dead matter. We have no dead matter. It is not a good 
plan to use a scientific term in an incorrect sense. 

Question — Why is buddhi translated "reason" when 
we are told that the huddhic faculties are much higher 
than reason? 

Answer — Because in the early theosophical days any 
convenient Sanscrit term was caught up to express a 
fact, and so we got an imperfect nomenclature. Madame 
Blavatsky was perfectly sound on facts. When she saw 
the need of a word to express an idea she would say to 
the Hindu who happened to be there, What do you call 
that, and she would try to describe what she saw. He 
would say, perhaps, I think you mean what we call 
buddhi. 

Question — If everything has an astral counterpart, 
why cannot drunkards satisfy their cravings on the astral 
plane as well as those prompted by higher desires? 

Answer — They do try to satisfy them by getting into 
touch with the physical body of the drunkard and stimu- 
late him to drink so that the etheric part may have a sort 
of vicarious satisfaction, for there is no drink on the 
astral plane. The astral counterpart has not necessarily 
all the qualities that envelope matter. Astral matter is 
different from physical matter. There will be an astral 
counterpart of the drink, but it will not have the intoxi- 
cating qualities of the drink. You will very readily un- 
derstand that if you remember the very well-known chem- 
ical fact that you may have the same chemical elements 
joined together in the same proportion and yet have an 
entirely different compound. It is very well known in 
organic chemistry. 



ANSWEES 



153 



Question — What is the theosophical explanation of 
multiple personalities ? 

Answer — It may be due to obsession, an outside entity 
taking possession of the physical body, and it may be a 
peculiarity of the person's own consciousness, the con- 
sciousness in the astral showing itself on the physical 
plane, or consciousness of the mental showing itself in 
trance through the physical. 

Question- — If mental and moral qualities are not inher- 
ited, how can seemingly hereditary resemblances in those 
lines be accounted for ? 

Answer — You account for the apparent hereditary 
resemblances by the fact that there is a play upon the 
child during the ante-natal life of the energy, the 
thoughts, the desires of the father and mother, and those 
do, to a certain extent, impress themselves on the child. 
They help build up the body of the growing child. More- 
over, an ego is assigned to a family which by physical 
heredity can give him the kind of body he needs for 
showing out his own peculiarities. Suppose an ego with 
great musical faculty is to be born. He will be guided to 
a family in which the nervous system has become sensi- 
tive in order that the ear will be more delicately organ- 
ized. 



KOV 13 t^f 



